The ending of this western is unprecedented and Tarantino loves it!

The ending of this western is unprecedented and Tarantino loves it!

in the province of Utah, USA. The extreme cold of the winter of 1898 drives outlaws, lumberjacks, and starving peasants to flee the forests, mountains, and pillage villages for survival. Their heads are quickly evaluated by the government. A group of bounty hunters respond to the call, enjoy legality, prefer the “dead” to the “alive”.

At its head is the most brutal: Tigrero (extraordinary Klaus Kinski). Pauline (Vonetta McGee), whose husband was murdered in front of her by this sadist, decides to hire a man nicknamed Silence to help him get his revenge…

Far from the sun-charred landscapes or picaresque aspects of the West that his colleague Sergio Leone explored in his Dollar Trilogy; At the opposite extreme also from John Ford, who saw a return to the West and its wide open spaces and a refuge for the pioneer values ​​that largely shaped the face of America, Sergio Corbucci chooses a great silence, rather an extraordinary mountain. and snowy landscapes. and is inspired by authentic events that relate Johnson County WarWhich years later was also used as a template for Michael Cimino’s cursed masterpiece, Heaven’s Gate.

An anarchist filmmaker, imbued with the revolutionary ideas he discovered in Malcolm and, among others, a film that Quentin Tarantino largely borrowed for his own western The Dirty Eight.

A moral that is never saved

In big silence, the good guys don’t win in the end; (good) morals are not saved; A new dawn does not rise. A unique work, surprisingly radical and so nihilistic that its American distributor Fox, who co-produced the film, refused to release it across the Atlantic.

The only Western in the career of the late Jean-Louis Tritignan, who plays Silence (and for whom it was his favorite role), the mute vigilante whose throat was slit by his parents’ killers in his youth, the film also aims to. Be hyper-realistic (cold preserves corpses, freezes weapons…) to culminate in a final massacre that again deviates from genre codes.

Here, the final shot is not a result of who plays the fastest. The survival bonus is especially for those who draw in the last and most cowardly way. With his arms horribly damaged before the final showdown, Silence is again seriously injured by a bounty hunter lurking in his arms before Tigrero shoots him in the head.

Mesmerized by the extraordinary music of Ennio Morricone, who signs this film to one of his most beautiful soundtracks, the audience is stunned to find the hero, who seems unable to draw the revolver due to injury until he finishes.

Witnessing the scene, Pauline rushes to try and grab Silence’s revolver and finish the job before she too is shot. And Tigrero carried out the last massacre with his henchmen on the villagers, who were taken hostage in the cabin.

Here’s the end again…

The ending was so pessimistic that American co-producer Darryl F. Zanuck prompted Sergio Corbucci to shoot another one, this time an upbeat one. The director did, but it was so (and intentionally) outrageous that it was useless. According to Corbucci himself, the producer never forgave him for this insult.

Here it is :

What remains is the first ending of a rare savagery, both brutal and sublime. All the better for movie buffs and Western fans who have a completely justified cult following for this huge film; One of the best transalpine westerns.

Source: Allocine

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