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 Loco is a bounty hunter after some outlaws hiding in a "snow-swept frontier." The only person between
Loco and the outlaws is a "mute gunslinger named Silence." They call this movie
a "bleak, brilliant and violent vision of an immoral, honorless west." 1968, 105 minutes, Widescreen DVD
This is some sort of winter wonderland spaghetti western that involves a bunch of criminals in Utah getting what they deserve (though I think the film would have us believe that they were the good guys). Director Sergio Corbucci (Django) gives us the standard Italian horse opera, but sics a snowstorm on the proceedings. Since real men never can get enough of dirty-looking dudes that wear their perpetual five o'clock shadow like some sort of frontier hipster soul patch and run around squinting, busting up saloons, and letting their gun carry most of the conversation for them, the whos, whys, and wheretofores aren't really that important.
Just so long as we have lots of jarring close-ups of the eyes of both good guys and bad guys, twangy music that announces the vast emptiness of man's existence that just so happens to be mirrored by his endless and inhospitable environment, and a backstory with typically revenge-driven elements, we'll go ahead and give the movie's slipshod plotting and overlong running time a pass and pronounce this as one of the classics of the genre.
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 interesting dynamic Corbucci draws between the characters that initially make you wonder why you should be rooting for Silence instead of Loco (who is clearly supposed to be the bad guy). Later on Loco makes it quite clear, he's a no good piece of trash, but for a while, Silence's modus operandi wasn't exactly the classic western anti-hero gimmick you would expect. 
Some French guy I never heard of named Jean-Louis Something Or Other plays Silence and in case you're worried about a French guy in an English language Italian movie, you can rest easy because Silence is one of those heroes whose name is representative of what he embodies. Silence 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. (It looked to me like the only thing he was trying to avenge was the widow's newfound celibacy!) Anyway, it turns out that the young Silence witnessed the murder of his parents and then had his vocal cords cut by the evil general store owner who was in on the hit.
Silence may not have been "the man with no name", but he was "the man with no larynx" which while not as catchy on a video box, is still a fairly bitchin' superpower to have in the old west, especially in the mountains of Utah.
So, what in the world were we doing in Utah? Heck, beats me. What is anyone doing in Utah? At the end of the movie, there's some text that comes up on screen about how there were some bounty killings that occurred at the end of the 1800s there and a bunch of people got slaughtered and there was some outrage and it wasn't long before the bleeding hearts gave all the criminal scum in this country all these so-called rights and pretty much just turned over the keys to this great country to them.
Luckily, we still have people like President Charlton Heston standing between regular guys who like guns and the government who is interested only in putting up as many roadblocks between dirtbags and vigilante justice as possible. Back in the good old days (a time when names like Pinkerton, Earp, and Tonto were more important than names like Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings), you had a bunch of bandits milling around in the mountains near Snow Hill, Utah who had prices on their heads. And there were actually people with the jewels to go out, hunt them down, and collect the bounty and the post offices only had a couple of wanted posters instead of a whole binder full. (See what happens when you outlaw vigilante justice?)
Klaus Kinski (who is apparently German) 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. Early on, we establish that Loco is knocking these people off for no other reason than he has to make a living and the government says they'll pay for these bandits dead or alive.
Silence is riding through the area 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? Uh, yeah, in theory, 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!
We see him put this into practice when he stands in the doorway of the saloon and refuses some guy's repeated requests to close the door and keep the cold out. (Was he raised in a barn?) Finally, and for those of us afflicted with poor circulation, I think quite understandably, this guy gets up and decides that if Silence is going to be a jackass and let old man winter in on the poker game, he's just going to have to shoot him down. This is Silence's cue to waste the sucker and everyone's kind of peeved, but the sheriff's attitude is "it's self-defense, even if he did goad him into it". You've got to love that old west code of honor.
After all this, the evil shop keeper (this movie probably should have put a little more effort into getting a more impressive "Mr. Big" - was I really supposed to believe that the owner of the local 7-11 was having people massacred because they were behind on paying for their flour and horseshoes and whatnot?) wants Loco to kill Silence, but Loco refuses because there ain't no 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 takes a little beating before whacking 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. The evil shop keeper (I just like writing that phrase) shows up to try and bail out Loco, but the sheriff is intent on taking Loco to the county seat and starts babbling about how the times they are a-changing and that they are in the middle of remaking the country into some type of law and order place where public defenders, motions to suppress evidence and Fifth Amendment rights were taking the place of creepy German actors with Spanish names.
Loco may be a relic of an age whose time is ending (wild west giving way twentieth century civilization), but I think I told you earlier that he was crazy like a fox! He and the sheriff go tromping through the snowy landscape when Loco decides that he suddenly has to take a dump. (A shot glass full of cigars will do that to a man!) The sheriff, demonstrating some of that old west savvy we've seen before in such shows as F-Troop, decides to walk around on a lake with thin ice, while allowing Loco to take his dump right next to the rifle Loco has buried in the snow. I think we all know how this turns out and I think we all know where some of the weakest parts of the story are, right? Loco escapes, hooks up with his cronies and captures all the bandits and holds them hostage in the saloon until Silence shows up. 
If you are at all still on the fence about whether this movie is worth your time, the ending alone justifies it. I sat there watching things unfold and went slack jawed as they played out. It was one of those times when I was mentally trying to figure out how they were going to weasel out of things and it harkened back to the time when I was still crapping my drawers and sucking my thumb and saw Star Wars for the first time and watched Ben Kenobi get jobbed by Vader. I spent the rest of that movie trying to figure out how they were going to bring Ben back, but they never did (well except for his running his yap in Luke's obviously psychotic mind). The only thing else that needs to be said about the ending is that you should only watch the silly alternate ending provided on the DVD after finishing the film.
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.
The ending is fitting then, in that it inverts and twists everything you come to expect from the western genre and Corbucci manages to detonate the conventions that had afflicted these films like a bunch of predictable yet still irritating saddle sores. The fact that while Silence is clearly the good guy and Loco the villain, Corbucci is still able to draw 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 and leaves 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!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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