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

Don’t watch it again. It might drop to a shaky 7,1/10.

I still need to review it, so I’l be watching it at least once more.

Hey there, do you by any chance have a link for the HDTV version? The torrent is dead. Cheers

If there is a German HDTV print, how come Kinowelt backed out on the Blu-ray release? Or was the HDTV print not deemed of a high enough quality for a Blu-ray release?

we do not support illegal filesharing, btw

As far as I know it is no real HD.

I gave it another chance just now. Not to my taste, but powerful, thought provoking and superbly crafted.

Just wanting to check with you guys - did Vonetta McGee provide her voice for the English version? Because I was watching a scene from the English dub of Cemetery Without Crosses, and I distinctively heard Michele Mercier speaking with McGee’s voice from that film.

I always assumed she did, but after what you say maybe not :slight_smile:

McGee’s voice in TGS (and by extension Mercier’s in CWC) is similar to those in movies like Blacula and The Eiger Sanction, albeit with a lighter tone. Maybe she provided her voice for the Spaghetti Westerns (she did live in Rome during that time), and her voice deepened afterwards…? I dunno, just scraping for answers I guess.

Happy ending for this wild SP !!!
but I prefer the other one.
Happy ending for this movie just sucks, you know!

Masterfuly directed western, Corbucci was on fire and Morricone composed one of his most memorable tunes. Perfect actors too. The story is pretty lame though and does not make much sense with sooo many logical holes. There are actually more outlaws and bounty hunters in Snowhill than regular citizens. This small village also employs too many sheriffs. Wouldn’t be one just perfectly enough? And what for reason there is a judge? How can this village afford to pay all the bounties? It must be the richest village in USA. What people do there anyway? It’s bloody snow hell. Why didn’t these outlaws just kill all the bounty hunters? I mean, noone gives a sh*t what’s going on there anway. I had to laugh when Silence rides his horse towards the pub after he had met outlaws on his way, one of the outlaws decides to go home and later is killed by Trigrero… When Silence makes it to the pub, the outlaw is already being buried! :astonished:

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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?
[/quote]

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?
[/quote]

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.
[/quote]

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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