The Strong, Silent Type: Anti-Westerns and The Great Silence

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.

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.

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 20^th 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.

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.

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?

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.

The Great Silence (1968)