’68 Rides Again: The Return of Sergio Corbucci

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/movies/sergio-corbucci-the-great-silence.html

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One of the best genre films of 1968 was among the very best commercial releases of 2018. Sergio Corbucci’s “The Great Silence” escaped the vault and is available for streaming from Amazon Prime and Vudu.

Corbucci (1927-90) may be Sergio Leone’s only rival as the maestro of Italian westerns, and “The Great Silence,” which had its belated theatrical opening last spring, is arguably his masterpiece — stylized, subversive and superbly perverse, not least in its casting, mise-en-scène and Ennio Morricone’s typically eccentric score.

Morricone’s occasional passages of raga rock notwithstanding, the world of “The Great Silence” is alpine. The frozen landscape not only recalls 1950s Hollywood “northwesterns” like “The Far Country” but the German “mountain films” of the 1920s and ’30s. Everything is blanketed with a deep snow that, among other things, highlights the frequently spilled, bright-red blood. The sensibility is high ’60s. Ostensibly set in Utah, the movie anticipates Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971) both as a snowbound western and a western with a strong left-populist view: The law exists to protect the rich.

[A.O. Scott’s review of “The Great Silence”]

The white void in which much of the action unfolds can be variously read as a comment on frontier morality or as an existential landscape. There is also an absurdist element. Disenfranchised settlers, driven from their homes into banditry and the mountains, are the good guys; the rapacious bounty hunters sent to kill them on behalf of a malevolent banker are the capitalist villains, depositing their victims’ corpses, for which they receive cash, in the snow — frozen assets for later retrieval.

The movie’s archetypically taciturn hero, played by the French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant between roles in “A Man and a Woman” (1966) and “My Night at Maud’s” (1969), is totally silent — rendered mute in childhood when his vocal cords were slashed by mercenary marauders. Silence, as he is called, is a hired gun and potential liberator; the über-villain is a bounty hunter gleefully personified by Klaus Kinski camping it up beneath a priest’s flat-brimmed saturno hat and a blond Beatle wig.

From a distance, the two enemies are indistinguishable, lone horsemen plodding through the snow. A new sheriff (burly Frank Wolff, veteran of late 1950s drive-in cheapsters like “Beast From Haunted Cave”) complicates the conflict, in part through his irrelevance. The bandit families, who sometimes suggest the ravenous extras in the original “Night of the Living Dead,” waylay the sheriff for his horse, which they plan to eat. Early on, there is a terrific scene in which the hired gun, the bounty hunter and the lawman are fellow travelers on the same cramped stagecoach, not fully aware of one another’s identities.

Affirming Trintignant’s status as French cinema’s prince of romance, the cast is rounded out with the fiery Vonetta McGee, in one of her first movies four years before “Hammer” and “Blacula,” both 1972, elevated her to blaxploitation stardom. Their impossible love, unusual not as interracial but for its tenderness and sexual heat, sets up for an ending so shockingly pessimistic that it has been said to have precluded the movie’s American distribution and was changed for its second run in France. (The available version has the original ending.)

A vocal spaghetti western aficionado, Quentin Tarantino paid homage to “The Great Silence” with his snowbound 2015 western “The Hateful Eight.” Indeed, reviewing “The Great Silence” in The New York Times last spring, A.O. Scott wrote that “in 2018, it’s possible — and perhaps inevitable — to view ‘The Great Silence’ as a footnote to the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino, whose admiration for Corbucci is well documented.”

Be that as it may, Corbucci was inventing something new. He was a politically committed artist working in a popular form. “The Great Silence,” according to the filmmaker Alex Cox, an equally enthusiastic partisan of Italian westerns, was meant as a statement reflecting the despair Corbucci felt following the death of Che Guevara.

A number of other Corbucci westerns, some originally released here under his American pseudonym Stanley Corbett, are available for streaming. Best known is his 1966 commercial breakthrough, “Django” (available on Amazon Prime and Vudu). Civilization in this enormously successful and exceedingly violent revenge saga is scarcely more than a muddy hellhole where life is less than cheap.

Played by Franco Nero, Django makes a memorable entrance dragging his coffin behind him. His foes are rabid white nationalists, terrorizing Mexicans and riding around in flaming red Ku Klux Klan hoods; those in Corbucci’s even more violent follow-up, “The Hellbenders,” also from 1966 (Amazon Prime), are a band of unreconstructed Confederates led by Joseph Cotton.

“Django” not only gave its name to Tarantino’s first western but spawned a score of sequels. None were directed by Corbucci who, in his third 1966 release “Navajo Joe” (Amazon Prime, Vudu) introduced another underdog hero, this one representing an oppressed race. Hair dyed black and slathered in man tan, the movie’s eponymous star, Burt Reynolds, is a one-man gang of destruction, wreaking vengeance on the white scalp hunters who murdered his wife. The score is among Morricone’s best, making use of tom-toms, banshee shrieks and the repeated chanting of the hero’s name.

“The Mercenary” (1968), a bigger budgeted production, replete with battle scenes and religious pageants, can be streamed from Amazon Prime. Set during the Mexican Revolution, it concerns a European mercenary known as “The Pole” (Franco Nero) who pragmatically switches sides, breaking with the corrupt government to work for a rebellious, if self-aggrandizing, peon (Tony Musante) and his ultraleft mistress (Giovanna Ralli). The Pole remains cynically detached from politics throughout; the movie’s real villain is the murderous American dandy played by Jack Palance in a curly black hairpiece.

Made during a period of Italian turmoil and even more overt in its insurrectionary attitude, Corbucci’s 1970 “Compañeros” (Amazon Prime, Vudu, iTunes) brought back Nero as a Swedish arms dealer with Tomas Milian, dressed to resemble Che, taking the part of the seditious peasant. A gaggle of militant left-wing students added to the mix. Here, the villainous gringo (Palance again) has a pet eagle named America who feeds on the flesh of butchered Mexican peasants.

With tropes like that, you might see the Tarantino oeuvre as a footnote to Corbucci’s.