Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence). 1968. Italy/France. Directed by Sergio Corbucci. Screenplay by Vittoriano Petrilli, Mario Amendola, Bruno Corbucci, Corbucci. With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Frank Wolff, Vonetta McGee. Courtesy CSC - Cineteca Nazionale. In Italian; English subtitles. DCP. 105 min.
Said to have been intended as a cry against the assassinations of the revolutionaries Che Guevara and Malcolm X, Sergio Corbucci’s masterful The Great Silence has achieved a cult following for its uncompromisingly bleak cast on American violence, racism, and greed. A portrait of frontier justice meted out during the Great Blizzard of 1899, the film is set in a spare and annihilating wintry landscape to rival those of John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn, André de Toth’s The Day of the Outlaw, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Ennio Morricone’s score, which the composer considered his best for a Spaghetti Western, is “reminiscent of the Dies Irae mass and Giacinto Scelsi’s hypnotic Hymnos from 1963,” as the scholar Mark Lager observes. “[His ’Voices in the Desert’] is a requiem for the lost lives of 1968.”