The Great Silence

The traditional slow-speaking taciturnity of the Western hero is taken to the extreme in Django director Corbucci’s hard-nosed, politically-provocative snowbound Spaghetti Western, set in turn-of-the-last-century Utah but filmed in the Italian Dolomites, where Jean-Louis Trintignant’s mute gunslinger has to face off against a band of outlaws led by Klaus Kinski at his most unhinged—and that’s saying something. According to no less a personage than Repo Man director and Spaghetti connoisseur Alex Cox, Corbucci’s “tightest, most relentless Western; his best and his bleakest.”