Silence is Golden

I knew The Great Silence (1968) was supposed to be a grim and bloody spaghetti Western, but hoo-boy!

The movie takes place in the Western town of Snow Hill. The new sheriff is waylaid by bandits on his way to town. They take his horse to eat. These bandits are ragged and starving, but they hold out hope that if they can avoid the bounty hunters, the governor may pardon them. I don't know, I kind of feel like hill bandits are an Italian thing.

The sheriff (Frank Wolff) hitches a ride on a stage coach with two other passengers: Jean-Louis Trintignant, a silent man named Silencio, and Klaus Kinski, a talkative but polite bounty hunter. Kinski's character is called Loco in the Englush subtitles but Tigrero in Italian. I only mention this because it sounded to me like Figorello which made him sound like a Chico Marx character.

Kinski has been working the bounty angle hard, mostly going for the dead side of dead or alive. Trintignant, on the other hand, is on the side of the people, opposed to the bounty hunters. He is silent because he had his throat cut by bounty hunters as a kid. He carries a Mauser C96, a cool pistol with a square magazine and a wooden holster that can be converted to a short shoulder stock. He always waits for a man to draw before he shoots them, and he never misses.

But when he tries this with Kinski, Kinski won't draw - until he punches him through the door. But when Kinski draws, the sheriff arrests him for drawing on a man without a gun in his hand. So the sheriff takes him away to prison in Tonopah. This won't end well for the sheriff.

Silencio is working for Vonetta McGee, because Kinski killed her husband. He also starts sleeping with her. When the judge who runs the bounty system tries to rape her, he fights back, but they burn his hand - before he kills them all. 

That's pretty grim, but I'll just spoil the ending for you so you have a reference. Kinski and the bounty hunters hold all the bandits hostage, demanding Trintignant show up for a fair duel against Kinski. Of course, his gun hand is burned, so not very fair. But that doesn't matter. A random bounty hunter just shoots him with a rifle before the showdown begins. Then they shoot all the hostages - they aren't worth much for bounty, but there are a lot of them, so...

This was made by Sergio Corbucci (Django), which is pretty nihilistic, but sort of funny. This isn't funny at all, and is very nihilistic. I should say, it has some nice shots of the snowy mountains (Italian Dolomites, mostly) - a change from the deserts of Spain that these movies usually use for a setting.