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| The Great Silence (Re-release poster) |
Watching
Clint Eastwood’s soul-crushing, and arguably greatest, masterpiece Unforgiven (1992), one can’t help but
think the actor-turned-director must have at least seen The Great Silence (1968) at some point. Eastwood himself has
described his film, which won four Oscars at the 1993 Academy Awards (Best
Picture, Best Director [Eastwood], Best Supporting Actor [Gene Hackman], Best
Film Editing [Joel Cox]), as an anti-Western. That seems as best a description
as any for a film that appears to take every ingredient necessary for the
classic genre and do them completely backwards and upside-down.
Eastwood’s
character, William Munny, is not a good guy. At the first, we are meant to
think he is. He is a father, a teetotaler, a farmer, a rancher, and a widower.
We hear quite a bit of him talking to his children about how their deceased
mother turned him from his “wickedness” and set him on the straight and narrow.
The aging gunfighter cares only for his son and daughter, and the potential
life they could have on the more affluent west coast, if only they could get
there.
Slowly,
we begin to learn that he wasn’t so much a gunfighter as a violent drunk in his
younger days. A man who would get mean when inebriated and kill a person for
looking at him the wrong way. His mission to kill a pair of cowboys who roughed
up a young prostitute is now an endeavor of necessity, and it speaks to the
change in Munny’s heart that he has such difficulty carrying out the task. In
this way, he calls to mind another character Eastwood famously portrayed: The
Man with No Name, in Sergio Leone’s defining Spaghetti Western trilogy
comprised of A Fistful of Dollars (1964),
For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
The character is essentially the same, though supposedly a different person, in
each installment.
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| Clint Eastwood as William Munny in Unforgiven (1992) |
The Man
with No Name shows up as a peculiarly moral incarnation of a drifter, bounty
hunter, and hustler. Though he appears to only care about money, he often shows
a decidedly altruistic and humanitarian bent, such as when he saves a kidnapped
mother and her family in A Fistful of
Dollars, or helps a dying captain prevent further bloodshed in the battle
over a useless bridge in The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly. Actions such as these ultimately derail the common
interpretation that the character is an anti-hero. In spite of the grittiness,
the moral ambiguity necessary for the heroic outlaw archetype simply is not
present. The Man with No Name only kills bad guys. William Munny, on the other
hand, kills pretty much anyone who gets in his way – especially when he’s been
hitting the bottle.
This is
brought to light nowhere better than when Munny kills the young cowboy who was
present when his partner attacked the prostitute. He’s clearly not a villain,
only a naïve lad who got mixed up with the wrong company. He even tries to make
amends for his partner by giving the girl his prized horse; the message plainly
being that he does not deserve the fate that he receives at the hands of our ‘hero’.
This is a prime example of what makes Unforgiven
an anti-Western: right and wrong are treated simply as words, and no one is
truly on the side of the angels. For these reasons, it does seem that The Great Silence certainly influenced
this tale of over-the-hill bounty hunters out for one last payday.
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| Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) |
Filmmaker
Alex Cox (Repo Man [1984]; Sid &
Nancy [1986]) supposes that Eastwood did in fact see The Great Silence in Rome during the autumn of 1968. The actor was
there on a press tour for his American Western Hang ‘Em High (1968), his first Hollywood foray into the genre
since working with Sergio Leone. Rumor has it that he loved the film and
requested that producer Richard Zanuck buy the rights in order to remake it for
US audiences. Ultimately, the picture did not see a theatrical release in the
United States, supposedly due to the fact that Zanuck did purchase it and
subsequently hated everything about it. It remained little seen on this side of
the pond until released on DVD in 2001.
The Great Silence was directed by Sergio
Corbucci – not to be confused with Leone, or Sergio Sollima (The Big Gundown [1968]). Corbucci had
previously made his mark on the Spaghetti Western with the surprisingly violent
Django (1966), starring Franco Nero
in the title role of a gunman dragging a coffin through the muddy Southwest. Django was a loose remake of A Fistful of Dollars (that film itself
being a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo
[1961]), and it managed to be so popular that it unleashed an avalanche (or
perhaps, a mudslide?) of cash-ins all sporting the name Django in their titles.
In spite of this success, Django was
not the film Corbucci really wanted to make. He did, however, use said success
as a springboard to make the one he did.
Set in
the frozen, snow-bleached landscape of the Utah territory on the brink of the
20th century, The Great
Silence offers a West with no dusty streets, tumbleweeds, or boundaries
between right and wrong. Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as Silence, a mute
gunslinger who defends the innocent. He is pitted against the ruthless
bounty-hunter Loco, played by volatile powerhouse Klaus Kinski. Their showdown
over the desolate trading post town of Snow Hill plays out in a series of slow
burn confrontations where the outcome is always far from certain.
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| Jean-Louis Trintignant as Silence in The Great Silence (1968) |
If not
for the Western setting, one could be forgiven for thinking the film was a noir
instead of a cowboy flick. The action is sparse, and the atmosphere is considerably
heavier than fans of the hell-bent-for-leather style of adventure would expect.
If Eastwood’s Man with No Name is a man of few words, Trintignant’s Silence is
a man of literally none. The gunfights are devastatingly brutal, but there are
only a few, and they are over as quickly as they begin. This is a West where
survival is the only concern for most, and greed is simply a way of life. Anyone
with a moral center doesn’t last very long. Spaghetti Westerns are often
considered grittier and bleaker than the American films that spawned them, but
even by this standard, The Great Silence
is grim.
Violence
has certainly been a part of the Western ever since its inception. Indeed, as
far back as The Great Train Robbery
(1903), the Old West was ablaze with gunfire, dynamite, and mustachioed
ruffians. Often, however, the action is sanitized in the more classic examples
of the genre, such as John Ford’s Stagecoach
(1939) which, though it features blazing barrels aplenty, has none of the
blood or bleak outlook that was brought by the Spaghetti filmmakers years
later. Sollima’s The Big Gundown finds
its story set in motion by the rape and murder of a preteen girl, and Sergio
Martino’s late entry Mannaja: A Man
Called Blade (1977) opens with its hero chasing down a bandit and
liberating him from his right hand with a hatchet. The Spaghetti Western is, at
heart, a morbid and grisly affair by nature.
This is
not to say that American offering in a quintessentially American niche of film
aren’t violent or challenging, but Euro-Westerns (much like Euro-horror)
exhibit a tendency towards darkness in a way that the eponymous John Wayne
himself found unbecoming of the gallant and whitewashed vision of the West put
forth by the likes of Ford and Howard Hawks.
Still,
the ever-present morality of good versus evil seeps in at the seams in films
like A Fistful of Dollars. Even the
titanic struggle against tyranny shows up in revolution-centered installments
such as Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for
the General (1968) and Corbucci’s own Compañeros
(1970). This ethical dichotomy – good and evil, right and wrong, hero and
villain – is the bread and butter of the genre. Whether in Ford’s West where
the good guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black, or Leone’s wherein the
protagonist’s scuzzy and grizzled exterior hides an altruistic heart for the
innocent, the lines in the sand are drawn, however blurred they may be. What
makes The Great Silence an
anti-Western is simply that the line does not exist at all.
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| Trintignant; The Great Silence (1968) |
Much is
made of ‘the law’ in Corbucci’s frozen frontier. In fact, one could almost make
a drinking game out of every time a character mentions their actions were done,
“all according to the law.” The government has allowed bounty hunting in the
territories in order to bring criminals to justice in a land that is sparsely
populated with many places to hide. The result is bloodthirsty killers
terrorizing the frontier towns and getting paid to do so. It’s an upside-down
world where persecuted religious followers are branded bandits and driven into
the wilderness, while murderers receive rewards for killing a person simply
because their face is on a poster with a dollar sign attached.
It is a
direct contrast to the common theme of bounty hunters being the heroes, as in
Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy, Corbucci’s Django, and even Quentin Tarantino’s homage Django Unchained (2012). Here, the bounty killers are depicted as
ruthless, callous, and trigger-happy. Not at all unlike Eastwood’s William
Munny, after a few drinks. Meanwhile Silence, the fighter we are meant to root
for, is not necessarily above taking pay for his work either. His way of doing
things ‘all according to the law’ is by forcing his opponent to draw first,
thus securing an armor of ‘self-defense’. When both sides engage in murder for
pay, skating by on loopholes in the system, who really is the hero or the
villain?
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| The Great Silence (1968) |
Perhaps
the one ray of hope to found in The Great
Silence lies in a development that surely must have shocked the less
progressive (and let’s be honest, more openly racist) audiences of the time: an
openly affirmed interracial love scene. Silence has been hired by a young Black
woman by the name of Pauline to avenge the death of her husband at the hands of
Kinski’s Loco. The course of events brings them to her bed, and afterwards she
confesses her love to him. Simple stuff for modern audiences, and not shocking
at all in today’s climate (White supremacists and the Alt-Right
notwithstanding). It is one more thing, though, that brands Silence as an
outsider, and perhaps foretells the inevitable outcome of his clash with the
bounty hunters.
Silence
is an archetype based upon revolutionary figures of the 1960’s. Corbucci
himself has said as much, acknowledging the events of his film to be inspired
in large part by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and Che
Guevara. By the time the film opened in late 1968, all three of these
revolutionary leaders had been killed. In this sense, especially in regard to
the movie’s ending which is as cold as the landscape in which it is set,
Silence is tragically-fated man of the people. He ultimately takes no money
from Pauline, and marches stoically to his final confrontation with Loco in
spite of being wounded both in his shoulder and his shooting hand.
By the
time the gun smoke clears at the end of The
Great Silence, the body count is just as high as any Western tale. Here,
however, precious little of the blood belongs to villains, and most of it is
that of innocents. Though the scrolling text epilogue tells us that the
bloodshed at Snow Hill helped turn public opinion against the practice of
bounty killing, it brings us no solace. It is too little, too late. Evil going
free in the name of the law is the epitaph of The Great Silence, and essence of the anti-Western.
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| The Great Silence (1968) |
