This is a somewhat interesting but flawed movie with simple characters and interesting scenery but a ridiculous plot, terrible acting and no story. First of all, I extend my congratulations to the cast and crew for filming this thing largely in the snow. It must have been hell to work in these conditions in Italy in the ALPS.
The outdoor scenery of the mountains, forests, etc. is spectacular. This is one of Klaus Kinski's average performances as the vicious bounty hunter who leads a gang of ruthless killers. I personally think that they should have used his own voice rather than the dubbed in one. He speaks English, although with a heavy foreign accent. I don't see a problem with that since America had plenty of immigrants then. However, the producers chose to dub in an American voice and it's terrible. If they had used his own I think it would have made him even creepier and perhaps even as good as Lee Van Cleef in Good, Bad, and Ugly.
This is a gunfighter movie but the gunfights are generally poorly staged and choreographed. Unlike Sergio Leone who has them almost like a ballet set to bullfight music or Sam Peckinpah who almost has a movie set around gunfight scenes. Other westerns like the Magnificent Seven, Gunfight at the OK Corral, even the recent Kevin Costner movie Open Range have very well thought out and performed gunfight scenes, but not this movie. That is a big minus.
Anyway, the governor of the Utah territory decides to cleanup the outskirts so he sends a new sheriff. Yeah, right, like Wyatt Earp is gonna go all by himself to clean up Dodge City or Tombstone Arizona and fight at the OK Corral. He should have sent a company of rangers to back him up, don't you think? This new sheriff, who is an inept idiot, runs into a mob of fugitives and finds that his gun won't shoot because it is frozen. Yet later Klaus Kinski retrieves a gun that he had stashed days earlier in a snowbank and is able to blast away. Why wasn't that gun frozen? In the Clint Eastwood man with no name trilogy Clint played a bounty hunter. In this movie the hero is a bounty hunter killer. Is that some kind of statement in itself? The mob of fugitives who live in the hills supposedly were once good people who only turned to a life of crime out of poverty, desperation, and want, yet they pay the gunman to murder the bounty hunters? Where did they get the money? The hero supposedly humanely spares some individuals but shoots off their thumbs to prevent them from ever using a gun again. This is humane? What if they need to defend themselves or their families in the future? How are they supposed to hold tools etc.?
I actually thought that the massacre at the end was the best part of the movie but that the hero was a damned fool moron. The alternate ending was silly. The idea that the hero was mute and the rationale for it was pointless. It could have been done better with a hero who talks only a little like Clint Eastwood. And he could have had some other type of scar, etc. Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West had a similar motive of revenge and it worked better.
The Great Silence was a dark and brooding story and the juxtaposition of blood and snow was average, it had a tedious flash back sequence, a shocking (for that time ending) and lousy music by Morricone. As a Spaghetti Western at face value it barely delivered, which at the time was what it was created for. But the rest was very far fetched. You have a gang of outlaws with sickles (looking like medieval grim reapers with their hoods and great coats) with no reason to be there, walking easily over the top of deep snow unaided by snow shoes, while at the same time horses are breaking through and struggling. It's as if it was filmed at a ski resort with packed powder, which it come to think of it probably was. The town of Snow Hill was way too small and the gang of outlaws and the gang of bounty killers seemed to out number the town.
Sergio Corbucci just wasn't a five-star director. He filmed fast and furious, and a lot of times the script was made up as he went--and it shows. His style, like a lot of guys working in Italian exploitation, is very choppy. Way too many crazy zooms and close-ups intrude on the action. You have to be prepared to forgive a lot when watching this stuff, and people not tuned in to the whacked-out world of spaghetti exploitation will be thoroughly confused. Not too mention that the guy dubbing Kinski's voice sounds like a moron.
Technically speaking, the film is impeccably stupid. The dubbed dialogue is distracting, but it hardly matters because the cinematography is extraordinarily bleak, snowy, and harsh, the characters are badly-drawn, the score, by Ennio Morricone, is absolutely mediocre. But in the end, the story has no dramatic value. There's no higher truth that emerges from the events. Yes, I know, Corbucci's demystifying the West, and apparently, his film is based on a true story. So it is with "The Great Silence," which tells a story that has no message, no dramatic arc, no higher truth, nothing, extremely well. "The Great Silence" is a spectacularly made example of Level 1 film-making. It does what it says out to do, yes, but one cannot help but wonder why so much effort was expanded on making something so nihilistic and un edifying.
In all, a very average film.
The outdoor scenery of the mountains, forests, etc. is spectacular. This is one of Klaus Kinski's average performances as the vicious bounty hunter who leads a gang of ruthless killers. I personally think that they should have used his own voice rather than the dubbed in one. He speaks English, although with a heavy foreign accent. I don't see a problem with that since America had plenty of immigrants then. However, the producers chose to dub in an American voice and it's terrible. If they had used his own I think it would have made him even creepier and perhaps even as good as Lee Van Cleef in Good, Bad, and Ugly.
This is a gunfighter movie but the gunfights are generally poorly staged and choreographed. Unlike Sergio Leone who has them almost like a ballet set to bullfight music or Sam Peckinpah who almost has a movie set around gunfight scenes. Other westerns like the Magnificent Seven, Gunfight at the OK Corral, even the recent Kevin Costner movie Open Range have very well thought out and performed gunfight scenes, but not this movie. That is a big minus.
Anyway, the governor of the Utah territory decides to cleanup the outskirts so he sends a new sheriff. Yeah, right, like Wyatt Earp is gonna go all by himself to clean up Dodge City or Tombstone Arizona and fight at the OK Corral. He should have sent a company of rangers to back him up, don't you think? This new sheriff, who is an inept idiot, runs into a mob of fugitives and finds that his gun won't shoot because it is frozen. Yet later Klaus Kinski retrieves a gun that he had stashed days earlier in a snowbank and is able to blast away. Why wasn't that gun frozen? In the Clint Eastwood man with no name trilogy Clint played a bounty hunter. In this movie the hero is a bounty hunter killer. Is that some kind of statement in itself? The mob of fugitives who live in the hills supposedly were once good people who only turned to a life of crime out of poverty, desperation, and want, yet they pay the gunman to murder the bounty hunters? Where did they get the money? The hero supposedly humanely spares some individuals but shoots off their thumbs to prevent them from ever using a gun again. This is humane? What if they need to defend themselves or their families in the future? How are they supposed to hold tools etc.?
I actually thought that the massacre at the end was the best part of the movie but that the hero was a damned fool moron. The alternate ending was silly. The idea that the hero was mute and the rationale for it was pointless. It could have been done better with a hero who talks only a little like Clint Eastwood. And he could have had some other type of scar, etc. Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West had a similar motive of revenge and it worked better.
The Great Silence was a dark and brooding story and the juxtaposition of blood and snow was average, it had a tedious flash back sequence, a shocking (for that time ending) and lousy music by Morricone. As a Spaghetti Western at face value it barely delivered, which at the time was what it was created for. But the rest was very far fetched. You have a gang of outlaws with sickles (looking like medieval grim reapers with their hoods and great coats) with no reason to be there, walking easily over the top of deep snow unaided by snow shoes, while at the same time horses are breaking through and struggling. It's as if it was filmed at a ski resort with packed powder, which it come to think of it probably was. The town of Snow Hill was way too small and the gang of outlaws and the gang of bounty killers seemed to out number the town.
Sergio Corbucci just wasn't a five-star director. He filmed fast and furious, and a lot of times the script was made up as he went--and it shows. His style, like a lot of guys working in Italian exploitation, is very choppy. Way too many crazy zooms and close-ups intrude on the action. You have to be prepared to forgive a lot when watching this stuff, and people not tuned in to the whacked-out world of spaghetti exploitation will be thoroughly confused. Not too mention that the guy dubbing Kinski's voice sounds like a moron.
Technically speaking, the film is impeccably stupid. The dubbed dialogue is distracting, but it hardly matters because the cinematography is extraordinarily bleak, snowy, and harsh, the characters are badly-drawn, the score, by Ennio Morricone, is absolutely mediocre. But in the end, the story has no dramatic value. There's no higher truth that emerges from the events. Yes, I know, Corbucci's demystifying the West, and apparently, his film is based on a true story. So it is with "The Great Silence," which tells a story that has no message, no dramatic arc, no higher truth, nothing, extremely well. "The Great Silence" is a spectacularly made example of Level 1 film-making. It does what it says out to do, yes, but one cannot help but wonder why so much effort was expanded on making something so nihilistic and un edifying.
In all, a very average film.
