Director Sergio Corbucci (Django) takes the standard Italian horse opera and inverts and skews everything you come to expect from the genre, punctures the conventions that had afflicted these films like a bunch of predictable yet still irritating saddle sores, and delivers a stunning ending that doesn’t let the film’s ambitions down one bit.

While Django was admittedly the more colorful and fun character (what’s more fun than a guy dragging around a machine gun in a coffin?), the two main characters, Silence and Loco, make for an overall better movie because of the dynamic between the characters where it’s not clear who’s good and who’s evil.

Loco later leaves no doubt he’s a piece of trash, but for a while, Silence’s modus operandi wasn’t exactly the classic western anti-hero gimmick you would expect.

Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a mute and while he’s shacked up with the widow of a guy whose death he’s supposed to be avenging, a flashback to his secret origin is triggered when he stares mournfully into a flickering candle. The young Silence witnessed the murder of his parents and had his vocal cords cut by the evil general store owner who was in on the killings.

Klaus Kinski plays the bounty killer named Loco and if he isn’t really crazy, then he at least looks the part, being the only blonde guy in the movie with big puffy lips, angular features and these saucer-sized blue eyes.

Silence is riding through the area (the snowy Spanish Pyrenees substituting for Utah) and gets involved when he shoots the thumbs off of some bounty killers and kills some others. Silence only kills in self-defense though which makes him this ultra good guy, right?

Sure, except it becomes apparent that his ideals regarding killing involve him actually trying to provoke people into trying to shoot him, so that he has an excuse to blast them!

The evil shop keeper wants Loco to kill Silence, but Loco refuses because there isn’t an official bounty out on Silence. This doesn’t mean that Loco is averse to getting into a bar fight with him though.

Loco may look crazy, but it turns out that he’s crazy like a fox! He knows that Silence is going to try and get him to lose his temper so that Silence has an excuse to shoot him, but Loco is determined to keep his cool.

It’s made a bit difficult for him when Silence stands in the bar and throws a match in Loco’s shot glass and then chucks a whole cigar into it. Loco must be a non-smoker because he has someone else hold his gun and instead of killing Silence, he kicks him in the head and starts to just beat his ass all over the bar!

Silence whacks Loco in the face with a nice chunk of firewood and looks like he’s going to get his chance to shoot Loco when Loco goes for his gun, but the sheriff interferes and hauls Loco off to jail.

Loco escapes though an ingenious plan that involves him having to take a dump, hooks up with his cronies and captures all the bandits and holds them hostage in the saloon until Silence shows up.

Corbucci distinguishes himself here with his stunning use of the snowscapes and with both Silence and Loco decked out in nearly identical black get-ups they look like a pair of undertakers stalking one another across some kind of frozen hell, determined to play out their little revenge drama even as the world that gave birth to them begins to disappear.

While Silence is clearly the good guy and Loco the villain, Corbucci still draws them with a little more depth than you would expect from your typical “quiet drifter/psycho killer” combo and makes the film that much more intriguing, leaving us to puzzle out what he was trying to tell us with the way things turned out.

Throw in the fact that Silence even managed to squeeze in an interracial affair during all this horsing around and this really stands out as the un-western of its era. Corbucci takes the genre that he pretty much pioneered, holds a slightly twisted mirror up to it and produces something that surpasses his classic Django and stands on its own, not just as a great western, but a great film. And if you don’t care about great films, you still get to see thumbs shot off!

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