The Great Silence / Il grande silenzio (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)

What are they?

We don’t know that. Maybe not everybody was hanging around the saloon. Besides, if Snow Hill could give work to three full time professional women, it must have had some population. The outlaws were, at least some of them, as it seems, regular citizens, ordinary people denied work by Pollicut, so they become petty thieves, and Pollicut put a bounty on them, for Tigrero and others to collect.[quote=“Diamond, post:428, topic:122”]
This small village also employs too many sheriffs. Wouldn’t be one just perfectly enough?
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Snow Hill has one sheriff with two deputies. He is replaced by orders of the governor by a new sheriff, Burnett, with a mandate to stop the bounty killers and carry through the amnesty (probably because the old one works with the bounty killers). The sheriff in the flash-back is a fake one.[quote=“Diamond, post:428, topic:122”]
And what for reason there is a judge?
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According to the territory’s law enforcement system of Utah there was a Justice of the peace appointed in every county. Small Hill was probably a county center.

It didn’t. They were paid by the territory.

They were ordinarily people, famished and poorly armed. Also, to kill a bounty hunter, who had the same authority as a sheriff, was a hanging offence. And there was an amnesty coming up.

He doesn’t ride his horse to the saloon, as he comes to Snow Hill on foot. He goes there because he is begged by the mother of the killed outlaw to revenge her son, which he eventually does.

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Right…commenting (whether negative or positive) or watching a movie needs more attention…

Some good arguments there. I like this discussion. :relaxed:

The question is what did they do there for living. It’s never explained. A judge can’t deny people to work. That’s not in his competence.

It’s not very likely to have center so far away from civilization.

But the money was in the hands of Pollicut. They would have to send money there via the area controlled by outlaws. Remember outlaws robbed people on the way there. It’s too risky imo.

In the first scene they shot a bounty hunter. Silence also killed few. Noone really cared. They were wanted “dead or alive”! I guess you are not wanted “dead” just for stealing bread. Bounty hunters were killing them, so what worse could happen? They would be still wanted “dead” if they killed bounty hunters.

He still arrived there too late. The mother begged him in front of the saloon. Was this the only pass to Snow Hill? We see troubled Silence on his way. He got stuck in snow and his horse died on the way. But somehow they managed to get there a wagon full of food.

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Hunting and trapping for sure, probably also lumbering, fishing and mining. My grandfather’s grandfather worked in these areas in those years, as a lumberjack. He left his farm and family behind on the Norwegian coast and crossed the Atlantic to find some paid work in that “bloody snowing hell”. [quote=“Diamond, post:433, topic:122”]
A judge can’t deny people to work. That’s not in his competence.
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Nevertheless he did exactly that to Pauline’s husband. He also got a provision from her husband’s killing. Later he tried to rape Pauline. That was not in his competence either. But this judge did, because he was corrupt through and through, a former bounty killer himself.

Most of the territories were far from civilization. It didn’t mean that the territory’s law enforcement system didn’t extend throughout the territory. Snow Hill had a sheriff and a Justice of the peace, so it was obviously a county center.

Pollicut, besides being the Justice of peace and a storeowner, also was the banker of Snow Hill.

Wells Fargo had a route through Snow Hill. They transported money. Actually we see the coach on its way to, arriving in an leaving Snow Hill without being robbed.

Well, that is what is going on in the film.

True. But as the outlaw’s leader put it “if we fought for our rights, they’d raise the price for our heads and we would be massacred." And as I said before, there was an amnesty coming up.

Too late for what? Let me recapitulate the whole sequence for you.

A young outlaw decides to turn himself in and take his chances with the law. We learn that he is adviced to put his trust in the law by his mother. She is contacted by two bounty killers pretending to be lawyers, who advices her to tell her son to turn himself in, promising to help him to get a fair trial. Instead they shoot him on sight. Silence arrives in Snow Hill in the moment she has just buried her son. The woman knows who Silence is and what he does, and begs him to go after her son’s killer in return for her son’s horse. (No, she is not begging in front of the saloon! There are more buildings than the saloon in Snow Hill!) The bounty killer is still in the saloon eating and drinking. Silence goes there and kills him right on time.

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The Great Silence is also notable for the way that it presents an active and untypical African American female as one of its lead characters. There’s a whole section devoted to this aspect of the film and Pauline’s un-generic character traits and behaviour in Lee Broughton’s book The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film.

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You actually make good points and it makes more sense for me now, but I still think it stands on rather weak legs. :stuck_out_tongue:

The locations in the movie are still very confusing for me. I needed a map! It’s so hard to say what is where and how people traveled from one place to another. This saloon or rather pub seems to be in front of some cemetery on the way to Snow Hill (not in Snow Hill where is another saloon), since Silence waits for stage-coach there and then goes to Snow Hill. The sheriff, who passed the same place as Silence did before, joins the stage-coach with Silence on the way to Snow Hill. I don’t know. :confused: It’s almost impossible to orientate in this mess. The continuity is terrible, but I still think the movie is pretty good otherwise and I’d give 4/5.

Everytime I see this thread get bumped I check it hoping there is a headline like coming to Blu-ray this year by “fill in label”. Never such luck though :frowning:

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You ask yourself a lot of questions I never asked while watching this one several times. And I surely will never ask. They have nothing to do with how the film works for me, Spags are rarely films for logicians, and TGS may not become the world’s most logical film, but it works as it is.

I suggest you don’t start looking at maps! You won’t find Snow Hill on a map anyway. You’ll find Tonopah though (the place where the sheriff was going to take Tigrero). It is in Nevada. Nevada was at one point part of the Utah territory. But I don’t think you’ll find the film to be historically or geographically correct in any way. And that was hardly the point. I don’t think I have seen one single SW completely without story and/or historical inconsistencies. What is more interesting with this film is the story it tells about bounty killers and outlaws. What I think sticks out a foot, is that Corbucci here set out to paint an entirely different picture from what Leone did in For a Few Dollars More.

I don’t care about history, I meant map for the movie, so I could understand how people managed to move from one area to another, they appeared almost like they teleported.

I usually don’t ask them, because SW are not to be taken seriously, but GS wants us to take it seriously so I ask them. I actually can’t thnk of another sw that is so dead serious.

Don’t mind me, i’m just passing through. But thought you could use this here map, good luck!:no_mouth:

You should have given this to the Frank Wolf’s sherrif. :joy:

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It’s a movie, sometimes it’s good not to overthink it, because I am pretty sure the makers didn’t either

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I’ve been doing that regularly since Kinowelt announced it years ago and then never released it.

If ‘Star Trek’, the Original Series, kept going for three series - purely down to the fans insistence on a second and third series - then, surely, the fans of sites such as ‘SWMDB’ can do the same.

The Companies that produce these ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ (‘Koch Media’ ‘Explosive Media’ etc), know that they are catering to a group of ‘Spaghetti’ afficienados.

Surely to goodness, if other ‘pressure groups’ (no matter what the subject) can influence Companies, Corporations, and the Environment, then why doesn’t the ‘SWDB’ - and all its supporters - do the same.

If ‘SWDB’ fans are wishing to see Classics, such as ‘The Great Silence’ released on Bluray etc.; then surely ‘SWDB’ has enough ‘influence’ and ‘history’ behind it, to influence a Production Company?

I’m probably talking through my sombrero…but - it seems to me - that ‘SWDB’ has enough ‘pull’ to, at least, put forward suggestions for future releases.

If those ideas are ignored by a Company, then fine…but at least everyone on ‘SWDB’ is telling the Company what the consumer desires…

Just a thought…

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so you are saying I should send StudioCanal an email? :wink:

or the head of a horse

Better that …