The Great Silence isn't a bad movie, it's just plodding and kind of dumb, like it was rushed into production as fast as humanly possible. It's riddled with glaring mistakes (like the rope attached to the whip, the treacherous mountain path obviously cleared by several snow plows, or the rider plowing through a remote snow pack in an ambush not noting the dozens of tracks already clearly visible in the snow). Also, I don't know how slitting someone's throat renders them mute, since your voice box are two tiny flaps of skin inside your throat, or why the mute character just didn't write down the names and descriptions of his parent's murderers.
Despite the violence it's rather lifeless. Instead of an interesting ending, they just give us...well, a different kind of boring ending. Then as now, critics are suckers for movies that "subvert our expectations." I dunno, The Ox-Bow Incident did this twenty five years earlier, so a pacifist, jaded western wasn't ground-breaking, I hate to have to say.
Though I'm sure fans will scream at me that it was a translation issue, the dialogue in this thing is atrocious. It's so on the nose it feels like a first draft that the writer never had time to come back to. The way the characters talk about how awesome the protagonist is behind his back is the worst kind of character building, and reminds me of the John Wayne movie where everyone compliments him when he's not on screen. A mute, blank piece of wood for a lead character is undeniably a terrible idea. I've seen porn actors emote more than Jean-Louis Trintignant. Supposedly it was a creative solution to remedy the fact Trintignant could not speak english, but that makes no sense as even the American actor Vonetta McGee is dubbed, and not very well I might add.
Oh, yeah, and it's got snow. That's kind of interesting, I guess.
Despite the violence it's rather lifeless. Instead of an interesting ending, they just give us...well, a different kind of boring ending. Then as now, critics are suckers for movies that "subvert our expectations." I dunno, The Ox-Bow Incident did this twenty five years earlier, so a pacifist, jaded western wasn't ground-breaking, I hate to have to say.
Though I'm sure fans will scream at me that it was a translation issue, the dialogue in this thing is atrocious. It's so on the nose it feels like a first draft that the writer never had time to come back to. The way the characters talk about how awesome the protagonist is behind his back is the worst kind of character building, and reminds me of the John Wayne movie where everyone compliments him when he's not on screen. A mute, blank piece of wood for a lead character is undeniably a terrible idea. I've seen porn actors emote more than Jean-Louis Trintignant. Supposedly it was a creative solution to remedy the fact Trintignant could not speak english, but that makes no sense as even the American actor Vonetta McGee is dubbed, and not very well I might add.
Oh, yeah, and it's got snow. That's kind of interesting, I guess.