The Great Silence

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Silence opens not on desert sun and showdowns, but on a frozen Utah frontier where survival itself is illegal. Sergio Corbucci's 1968 film plunges its audience into a blizzard so severe that starving settlers are forced to steal simply to eat. A corrupt banker named Henry Pollicut exploits their desperation, placing prices on their heads to seize their property after bounty killers cut them down. Against this machinery of greed stands a mute gunfighter who has spent his entire life unable to speak a single word. What silenced him, and whether anything can unsimple that wrong, are the questions the film refuses to answer comfortably. By the time Corbucci finished making it, three radical figures he admired had been assassinated. Their deaths shaped every frame.

• 2. A Director's Deliberate Turn

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  By 1967, Corbucci had grown weary of grinding out Westerns of uneven quality and commercial performance. Having just finished shooting the Eurospy film Death on the Run in Athens, he returned to Rome looking for a change. He settled on a Western set entirely in snow, partly as a tribute to two films he admired: André de Toth's Day of the Outlaw and John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn. He had thought about snowy valleys before, while planning Django, but budget and time had forced that earlier film into mud instead. The new project was a co-production between the Rome-based company Adelphia Compagnia Cinematografica and Paris-based Les Films Corona. Actor and producer Lars Bloch later noted that Corbucci's choice of location also allowed him to visit resorts in the Dolomites and go skiing while the cameras rolled, a detail that sits oddly against the film's savage political seriousness.

• 3. Casting the Silence

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  The mute hero at the center of the film was, improbably, born from a conversation with Marcello Mastroianni, who told Corbucci he had always wanted to appear in a Western but feared his inability to speak English would hold him back. Corbucci filed the idea away. When Les Films Corona hired Jean-Louis Trintignant for the lead role after Franco Nero turned it down, Corbucci discovered that Trintignant did not speak English either. Rather than recast, he simply made the character mute, sidestepping the language barrier entirely. Trintignant, then well-known for the critically acclaimed romantic drama A Man and a Woman, is believed to have accepted the part partly out of loyalty to co-producer Robert Dorfmann, a friend. It was the only Spaghetti Western Trintignant ever made. For the role of Loco, Corbucci drew on an unusual source of inspiration: the vampire Gorca, played by Boris Karloff in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath. He wanted Klaus Kinski to project something similarly inhuman and predatory. Vonetta McGee, cast as Pauline, was a pre-law dropout from San Francisco State College who had moved to Rome to find work at Cinecittà. The Great Silence was her first film. After its release, Sidney Poitier invited her back to the United States, where she built a significant career in the blaxploitation genre. Director Alex Cox later cast her in Repo Man based specifically on her work as Pauline.

• 4. Shooting in the Cold

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  Location filming began in late 1967 in Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Veneto region and in San Cassiano in Badia in South Tyrol. Log cabins and alpine-roofed structures were built specifically for the film. The surrounding hills served as the backdrop for Loco's gang's hideout, a way station, the stagecoach route, and the Snow Hill graveyard. Klaus Kinski, according to his autobiography Kinski Uncut, had an on-set affair during the Cortina shoot while his wife Brigitte and daughter Nastassja went sledding in the snow nearby. A separate flashback sequence was filmed at Bracciano Lake, near Manziana in Lazio. The Elios Film town set in Rome, which Corbucci had already used for Django, stood in for much of the town of Snow Hill. Because the set's artificial snow looked unconvincing in daylight, most of those scenes were shot at night, with 26 tons of shaving cream spread across the street to simulate the blizzard. Daytime scenes required the set to be wrapped in fog to hide the fact that the surrounding countryside was bare. On set, Vonetta McGee later described Corbucci as "the nicest man" who "never tried to put the make on" her, a point she attributed to the frequent presence of his wife Nori. The atmosphere soured in at least one documented incident: Frank Wolff had to be physically restrained from strangling Kinski after Kinski made an antisemitic remark directed at him. After that, Wolff refused to speak to Kinski unless the script required it. Kinski later claimed he had insulted Wolff deliberately, to help him get into character.

• 5. Political Allegory and Subversion

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  Corbucci, whose left-wing politics were rarely far from the surface of his work, constructed the film as an allegory about authoritarian capitalism. The bounty killers operate legally, fulfilling contracts placed by a banker who is also a judge of peace. They are the State, acting in the service of property and capital, and they win. This is a precise inversion of the Western's dominant formula, as described by critic Will Wright: in the standard model, a lone stranger rides into a troubled town, defeats the villains, and wins the love of a respectable woman. Corbucci systematically dismantles each part of that template. Silence's weapon of choice underlines the point. Where other Spaghetti Western heroes carry Colt Single Action Army revolvers, Silence uses a Mauser C96, a semi-automatic pistol whose rapid rate of fire gives him a technical advantage his opponents cannot match on equal terms. His speed comes from machinery, not virtue. Analyst Donato Totaro noted that Silence shares meaningful traits with Loco: both kill for payment. The hero is morally compromised, and the film does not flinch from it. Corbucci told the German magazine Film that he had dedicated the film to Che Guevara, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, all three of whom were killed while he was making it. As Alex Cox recounted from a conversation with Corbucci's widow Nori, Guevara and Malcolm X were specifically in Corbucci's mind as models for Silence's death: the powerful crush the righteous, and quickly.

• 6. Morricone's Score

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  Ennio Morricone composed the film's score, continuing a collaboration with Corbucci that had begun with Navajo Joe. Bruno Nicolai conducted the recording. Morricone himself placed the result among his finest Spaghetti Western work, ranking it second only to his compositions for Sergio Leone's films. Critic Robert Barry, writing for Electric Sheep Magazine, observed that the score deliberately abandons the soaring heroic melodies and driving rhythms associated with the Leone films, and instead resembles Morricone's own 1970s horror soundtracks, plus the work of Werner Herzog's musical collaborator Florian Fricke and modernist composers Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez. The tools are sparse: solo violins playing fifth intervals and flute lines build leitmotifs that track Silence's isolation. Critic Mark Lager, writing for CineAction, described how the celeste and choir in Silence's theme convey his status as a permanent outsider, while the trumpets' "diabolical cackle" signals Loco's arrivals. Full orchestral strings appear only once in the score: during the love scene between Silence and Pauline, a scene Corbucci himself considered the only one of its kind he ever placed in a film of this genre. The soundtrack was released on compact disc in 1995, 2005, and 2014. In April 2016, Dagored released a limited vinyl edition of 500 copies.

• 7. The Bleak Ending and Its Aftermath

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  Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox screened the film to evaluate whether it could be released on the American market. He was reportedly so shocked by the ending that he almost swallowed the cigar he was smoking, and he refused to distribute it in the United States. Corbucci's own producers were unhappy with the original finale and required him to shoot an alternate happy ending, intended to give the film broader appeal during its planned Christmas release. In this version, Sheriff Burnett survives his fall through the frozen lake and rides back into Snow Hill to rescue everyone. A second, lesser-known alternate ending was also delivered, depicting Silence wounded but the fates of the characters left unresolved. Film critic Simon Abrams, reviewing both for an essay included in Film Movement's Blu-ray release, described them as "emotionally dissatisfying conclusions for Corbucci's otherwise harrowing anti-fable." He found the happy ending notable primarily for including Silence's gauntlet, which he identified as a possible reference to a similar device used by Joe in A Fistful of Dollars. The theatrical film performed modestly in Italy, where an 18 certificate limited its audience, but fared better in France and West Germany. During a screening in Sicily, one audience member reportedly fired a gun at the screen in anger at the ending. The film did not reach British audiences until the 26th of August 1990, when Alex Cox introduced it on BBC2's Moviedrome block under the title The Big Silence. Its first American theatrical release came only in 2012, when a 35mm English-dubbed print owned by Swiss library Kinemathek Le Bon Film toured cinema screens across the country. A 2K restoration premiered at North American theatres on the 12th of November 2017, starting at the Winchester Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Between April 1 and the 27th of September 2018, that theatrical run earned $53,074.

• 8. Legacy and Influence

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  The Great Silence now holds a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 14 reviews, with an average score of 8.1 out of 10. Retrospective critics and scholars place it as the second film in what they call Corbucci's "Mud and Blood" trilogy, alongside Django from 1966 and The Specialists from 1969. Quentin Tarantino has cited it as his favorite "snow Western" and studied it alongside cinematographer Robert Richardson in preparation for The Hateful Eight; Richardson also paid tribute to it while noting he would choose Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch as his single favorite Western. Tarantino also paid homage to the film in Django Unchained. The film's reach extended into music: the Finnish Progressive Music Association organized the Colossus Project, inviting bands to compose extended pieces based on Spaghetti Westerns, and three groups produced 20-minute works inspired specifically by The Great Silence for the album The Spaghetti Epic Volume Three. Morricone's music was separately sampled and remixed by Thievery Corporation for the album Morricone Rmx. Alex Cox, who had introduced the film to British audiences on Moviedrome, later contributed an audio commentary and the featurette "Cox on Corbucci" to Film Movement's 2018 Blu-ray release. The Eureka Entertainment Blu-ray, released as the 257th entry in its Masters of Cinema series on the 22nd of November 2021, included an initial print run of 3000 copies with a reversible poster, four facsimile lobby cards from the original 1968 release, and a slipcase. A 4K restoration from the original camera and sound negatives was authorized in March 2017 by Cineteca Nazionale, and carried out at the Augustus Color and Studio Cine laboratories in Rome.