The Great Silence

Well this is my new favorite spaghetti western which means it’s a new top 4 Letterboxd favorite.  My jaw was on the fucking floor at the end. Magnificent film making here from Corbucci. Morricone once again proving himself as the greatest film composer to have ever done it with a breathtaking score, innovating and pushing forward the genre’s sonic palette that he already defined so well in the decade’s previous spaghetti westerns like Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy.  Speaking of the decades previous 🍝 westerns, many of the weaker entries in the genre contain somewhat repetitive/cliche tropes seemingly inherent to these movies, but The Great Silence fundamentally deconstructs a lot of those in some FASCINATING situations unlike what i have seen before. The settling and taming of the Wild West has been done many times, most notably in Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West which released only the previous year (holy fuck Morricone scoring those two movies back to back is mindblowing to me) but this handles that period with a much different, more raw attitude which is reflected in its unique environment. What makes the environment so unique? Snow. This single element makes The Great Silence so special. Sure there have been excellent snow westerns since like The Hateful Eight, but to my knowledge this is the first real snow western. An authentic snow spaghetti western by one of the genre’s masters with an authentic Morricone score. Holy shit. Wonderful wonderful stuff here I cannot praise this enough.  I watched the Italian dub as oppose to the English dub btw, I usually try to stick with English when it comes to 🍝🤠 but the quality difference is pretty big here, mostly due to the difference in skill in Italian VA and English VA at the time.  Usually when we look back upon this time in American history we like to imagine the outlaws, killers, and degenerates were all slowly weeded out as justice was dealt and the west was cleaned up by our leaders. We imagine the death of the west meant America grew and expanded for the better, outlawing the atrocities we see committed in these films. In reality those killers became the leaders and the oppressors. I could say so much more about the political and anti authoritarian themes here, and the clear decision for the antagonist to have blue eyes and blonde hair,