Rating: 3.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 11/52 | Spaghetti Western
A riffle tip peaks out from behind a snow bank. Across the way, a man in black rides his horse over the white canvas of snow. The man in black stops, an unease coming over him, and he surveys the hills. He ungloves his right hand and draws his Mauser C96. Bullets fly. The three men with riffles lay dead, bullet wounds on their heads. A fourth man comes out, hands in the air in surrender. “I’m through with bounty hunting! Don’t kill me, Silence!” The man in black, named Silence, shoots this man’s thumbs off, rendering them unable to fire a gun.
The man still tries, and a boy from over the hill kills the man. A group from Snow Hill follows down, paying Silence for handling the bounty hunters. The boy who fired demands a thanks from Silence. But Silence rides off. A townsperson explains to the boy that Silence only ever shoots in self-defense, and Silence doesn’t seem to think the man is a threat anymore. The boy leaves the group and runs back home to his mother. Also, there is a “lawyer,” Charlie, and a bounty hunter named Loco. Charlie shoots the boy, and the two drag his body into town, leaving the mother to wipe her son’s blood from her face.
The governor of Utah appoints Gideon Burnett as the new sheriff, demanding that he bring a stop to this murder for reward business. It’s 1898, for crying out loud—the wild west is dead. So, he sends Burnett to Snow Hill。 There, Loco tortures a man for bounty information, dragging him behind his horse. The mother has a funeral for her son. Silence comes into town and gets a hot meal. The mother approaches him, offering Silence a horse, all she can offer, in exchange for the death of Charlie, the lawyer. With no hesitation, Silence tracks him down and kills him.
When Loco pulls a similar move, killing a woman’s husband, she hires Silence to stop him once and for all. But Loco knows Silence and his methods.
They call him Silence because wherever he goes, the silence of death follows.
The film explores the myth of the dying Wild West. Yes, cowboys aren’t roaming the prairies on horseback as they once did, but the crooks who killed for profit took political and corporate power, hiding their crimes behind the technicalities of law. The people steal, but only out of necessity—the powers that be stand to gain more from their death than in helping the town live. Like brokers shorting stocks, the government bets on you losing; they call it law and common sense.
But as Silence shows, two can play that game. There is no victory when only one side is playing fair. So then, how can one corrupt the law to fight the powers that be? Can that be the one path to correcting such laws in the first place?
Klaus Kinski has never had trouble playing a villain in real life or movies. His character was supposedly influenced by Gorca in Bava’s Black Sabbath.
Jean Louis Trintignant only did this Western, but he demonstrated that he knew exactly how to play the revisionist Western protagonist — not good, but not as bad as the other.
The score has some tremendous moments—definitely my favorite part of the movie.
The movie doesn’t always make great use of its time. There’s depicting a long horse ride, and then there’s making us watch a long horse ride.
The ending is up for debate—I’ll leave it up to the viewer.