The Great Silence aka Il grande silenzio (1968)

[rddesq]

First Django and Django Kill both are dribble and are only worth watching if you want to be a "student" of Spag. Westerns.  Both are way overated.  As such it's no surprise that Django Strikes Agains is bad.  However, I must comment on Keoma.  I have watched about 15 non-leone Spag. Westerns and I keep coming back to Keoma.  It is really good and I think what keeps drawing me back is the sound track and the vocals.  The singing by the operatic women and the deep bass male vocal is haunting.  It is not a Morricone score but it really sticks in your head.  Next to The Great Silence I think I would put Keome maybe number 2 on my personal non-leone list so far.

[DJIMBO]

ive heard that keoma is one to see cheers rddesq

[Tucster]

Keoma is a good flick...but the singing is scary!

[cigar joe]

I receieved Keoma about a week ago with A Man Called Sledge and A Bullet for the General.
I couldn't play Keoma the DVD would just say reading and never play it sent it back and awating a replacement looking forward to giving you my critique.

I've heard +& - about the soundtrack. If it's like Leonard Cohen's soundtrack for McCabe & Mrs. Miller it will be ok with me

[cigar joe]

Jeez, how many times does Corbucci have to have a  5 minute long shot of horses stumbling through the snow?  Horses struggle, but then a stagecoach manages to get through mountain passes on a freshly plowed trail - uh, ok.  

Well I noticed this also, lol. I do know that they used (at least in the eastern US) to have the county road crews actually put snow on the roads in the wintertime. They'd have horsedrawn plows and a snow packer, but they were doing this for horse drawn sleighs (which most folks used in the winter) which makes sense. Don't know about Utah or the rest of the West but it is plausible that they may have kept some of the roads open with crews.

[DJIMBO]

i just think that the root of the problems of all these Spaghetti Westerns is that they are B-movies. Leone manages to transcend the genre whereas Corbucci and Barboni dont. Havent seen Sollima's films so i cant judge on him but the cheap element of Spags does ruin them.

[cigar joe]

Latest update, had to send Keoma back twice first to Bestbuy second time back to Anchor Bay, it just wouldn't start on either the JVC or the Sony Viao I'm typing this in on.

[mortimer]

Had a few problems with a rental bullet for the general  but keoma and 4 of the apocolypse played fine. Hopefully when my copy  of bullett..general and companeros get here from deep discount dvd they work!

[833P]

 Does anyone know if this was based on a true incident? I downloaded the Italian version of the film and added English subtitles. Oddly at the end of the film some German captions roll up outlining some kind of incident which took place in 1898. From what I can make out they refer to golddiggers, athough gold is not mentioned in the film. Anyone know the history of this?

[cigar joe]

I asked the same thing nobody seems to know, it may be just fiction, I guess a check of Utah history may be in order.

[DJIMBO]

i think Corbucci would have used some poetic licence there to get his Marxist message across - but you never know it could be based on a real event.

[833P]

I misunderstood the word Kopfgeldjäger. Apparently it translates as bounty hunter. 

"Die Massaker von 1898, dem Jahr der grossen Schneesturme, führten zu ciner entscheiden öffentlichen Verurteilung der Kopfgeldjäger, die unter dem Mantel der Legalität aus brutalem Mord ein einträgliches Geschäft gemacht hatten.

Viele Jahre lang stand in Snow Hill eine Mahntafel, die folgende Aufschrifte trug :
Die stiefel der männer können 1000 jahre lang den staub dieses ortes aufwirbeln. Aber nichts wird jemals die blutflecken der armen menschen auslöschen, die hier umgekommen sind."

"The massacres of 1898, the year the large snowstorm, led to one decide public condemnation of the head money hunters, that had made a lucrative business under the coat of the legality from brutal murder.  Many years long stood in Snow Hill a reminding board, which carried the following label:  The boots of the men can 1000 years long the dust of this place whirl up.  But nothing will ever extinguish blood marks of poor humans, who died here."

[Sensei]

On my DVD the text is in Italian and the translation is as follows:
The massacre of 1898, the year of the Great Cold, raised the public condemnation of the bounty hunters who, in a climate of false legality, made violence a way of life. An inscription was legible for years in Snow Hill, the area of the massacre: MAN MAY WALK OVER THIS PLACE FOR A THOUSAND YEARS BUT WILL NEVER WIPE OUT THE BLOOD OF THOSE WHO FELL.

There is also an alternate "happy ending" on the DVD where the sheriff comes riding in. Together with Silence he saves all the prisoners held by Kinski and his gang. There''s a note saying:
This "happy ending" was originally created for Asian and North African markets, where the producers felt audiences wouldn''t tolerate such a grim finale. No sound elements were available and there is some question as to whether any audio was ever created.

[cigar joe]

There is no town existing now that''s called Snow Hill in Utah, and in the film Frank Wolff was going to take Klaus Kinsky to a jail in Tonopah, now Nevada. Now I think Utah Territory included both states, but there is no Snow Hill in Neveda either.

Actually there were a number of Unionizing Wars and a massacre of striking miners and their families that happened around this time period late 1880''s through 1920 that this may be loosely based on.

Ludlow Massacre 1914

Near Trinidad, in Southern Colorado the Rockerfeller owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company''s mine workers tried to unionize under the UMWA. The company sent in the Baldwin Felts Dectective Agency (basically hire guns) to break up the organizing activities. They gunned down the union organizer and the mineres went on strike. Since they were striking they were violently evicted from the company homes they were living in. They took to the surrounding hills and set up tent camps. The Baldwin Felts then used an armored car equiped with a Browing Colt (potato digger) machine gun to do a drive by and terrorize the miners, they dug rifle pits inside the tents and continued fighting throught the winter. In the spring Rockerfeller had the Governor send in the state militia. The striking miners at first thought that the militia was there to protect them but the militia took up positions above the tent camps. At the biggest tent camp at Ludlow the militia opened fire with more machine guns an 11 year old boy trying to get water for his family was gun downed.

A freight train that stopped on a siding between the Militia and the tent camp enabled a lot of the women & children to escape abord the train. An attemp by the miners for a truce was attempted but the negotiator was clubbed and shot as he reached the militia. That evening the militia entered the tent city and set fire to the canvas. By morning it was a smouldering ruin. Two women and eleven children were found dead in a pit under a metal cot. It was known as the Ludlow Massacre in all 66 miners were killed.

The news of the massacre put pressure on both Rockerfeller (negative publicity), and  Pres. Wilson to send in the regular army to defuse the situation.

It was on Wild West Tech on the History Channel not too long ago.

[indio]

i''m thinking of buying this film i here the soundtrack is good but how does it rate as a film?