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Originally Posted by DeadChannel
I'm starting off with something that won't help my new years resolution, because I've seen it many times before. In fact, it holds the dubious honour of being by favourite spaghetti western (which makes it my favourite western as well)
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First look into your journal and was shocked to see this. I'm a huge spaghetti western fan and know this film so well. It's probably not my overall favourite, but certainly top 5 and I know it tops many people's lists.
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The Great Silence is a 1968 spaghetti western directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a mute gunslinger and Klaus Kinski plays a psychopathic bounty hunter.
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Jean-Louis Trintignant was without doubt one of the finest French actors of his generation and I'll always love him especially in The Conformist. Klaus Kinski was the perfect example of an actor that accepted any role, but always made it something special, such a unique actor and one of a kind.
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The movie takes place entirely in the snow. This gives it a creepy, almost claustrophobic atmosphere that contrasts with almost every other western ever made.
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The snow is its crowning achievement, but Corbucci was always a master of the using brutal environments for his westerns. For example the mud in Django is just legendary.
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The whole thing is typical Corbucci. Peoples thumbs get shot off, they stab each other in the back, they kill for the sake of money. Corbucci's films portray the west (or, in this case, the north) as being full of psychopaths and killers and bounty hunters in a way that he (and to some extent, the spaghetti western) only could. The entire aesthetic of the movie is blood contrasted against snow (also see: Fargo). As is often the case with Corbucci films, it has an aspect of social awareness to it as well, which I'm not going to spoil for you.
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Perfect summary, whereas Leone was all about style, Corbucci usually said bollocks to that and just went for blood and guts. The most vulgar scene in that film surely has to be Charley eating his chicken just before he's shot
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Visually, the piece is pretty good. I wish it had maybe a bit more contrast, but we have to remember that it was shot on a shoestring budget. Don't expect the wide angle cinematography of something like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, though.
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I think you'll find that the budget wasn't that low, as Corbucci was one of the biggest spaghetti directors at this time and in most countries where Italian films were shown, spaghetti westerns were booming business. Also Jean Louis Trintignant was one of the biggest actors in Europe at this time and the Alp location where it was shot wouldn't have been cheap like say the Spanish desert.