Blu-ray Review: Last Train From Gun Hill (1959)

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Originally purchased in 1954 by producer Hal Wallis as a potential western vehicle for either Burt Lancaster or Charlton Heston, although those efforts stalled, five years later, Wallis was able to see his dream of a big-screen adaptation of TV writer Les Crutchfield's thrilling story "Showdown" come true.

Sharing production duties with star Kirk Douglas's own company Bryna Productions, Hal Wallis reunited with the cast and crew of his 1957 Paramount hit "Gunfight at the OK Corral" two years later for the briskly paced, startlingly gritty, taut, high profile VistaVision release "Last Train From Gun Hill."

Directed by John Sturges and shot by gifted versatile cinematographer Charles Lang the exact same year he lensed "Some Like It Hot," he fills "Gun Hill" with a mixture of dark noir shadows and an at times luridly bright, flammable color scheme of reds, oranges, and yellows to almost expressionistic effect. This visual motif serves as an ingeniously bold yet still subtle depiction of the fiery aggression of its core cast of characters and helps the emotional core of the film remain ever-present from start to finish.

After U.S. Marshall Matt Morgan's Native American wife is raped and murdered by two young sadistic cowboys in front of their young son, the lawman (played by Kirk Douglas) vows to do whatever it takes to bring the killers to justice. Discovering their connection to his old friend Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn), thanks to a distinctive saddle on one's horse that his son was able to use to escape the villains, Matt journeys to Craig's Gun Hill with his gun and badge, even though he's advised that those things won't be welcome there.

"You work for Craig Belden?" Matt asks when he gets off the train, before, in a half of a line that fans of 1993's "Tombstone" know very well, he lowers the boom. "You tell him I'm coming."

However, it seems that Quinn's Craig Belden is in for a rude wake-up call as well. Having been told by his son Rick (Earl Holliman) that his horse and saddle had been stolen by thieves and that the garish scratch Rick's suddenly sporting on his face came from a lusty encounter, once Matt arrives and asks his old friend for help, Craig realizes that his son and friend are the ones responsible for the heinous crime.

And when Matt comes to the same conclusion as Craig, the shocked but proud man implores Matt not to arrest Rick, warning him that he not only runs the entire town but also the police. Informing Craig that he aims to bring Rick and Lee back to face charges on that night's last train leaving from Gun Hill, Matt embarks upon a lonely search throughout the corrupt town to track them down. And soon enough, he deduces that the only thing the people of  Gun Hill value less than the life of a Native American is that of a Native American woman.

Although it's reminiscent of "High Noon" in Matt's one against the world quest, which, like "High Noon" manages to work in a female ally as well in the form of Carolyn James, the tale that "Last Train From Gun Hill" seems to have the most in common with is ultimately "3:10 to Yuma," based on the 1953 Elmore Leonard story.

Made into a film at Columbia Pictures in 1957 from director Delmer Daves (after which it was remade by James Mangold in 2007), fans of "Yuma" will see a lot of similarities between the plight of Matt and Van Heflin's in "Yuma" as well. And this is especially evident when a fair amount of action in "Hill" plays out at a hotel after Matt manages to capture and subdue Rick, despite knowing he's surrounded by gunmen ready to free Craig's son (which we saw in "Yuma" with Heflin and Glenn Ford) before they can board that train.

While "Gun Hill" admittedly places a good deal of its emphasis on action whereas "Yuma" involves far more scenes of mental chess played between the two men, "Hill" is still a psychologically thrilling work as it presents Matt and Craig as two flip-sides of the same coin who've grown further and further apart in their attitudes of right and wrong over the years.

Using the same type of approach he used to balance the moral, internal struggle of his characters with terse, tense, temper driven bursts of prideful masculine violence that he employed so perfectly in 1955's masterful "Bad Day at Black Rock," Sturges, along with his crew, lends a real sense of artistry to the film. Elevating it above its otherwise predictable "B" revenge western feel, the 94-minute movie not only flies right by but also helps foreshadow the career that the director would have in the early '60s, helming "The Magnificent Seven" (with some of this film's collaborators) and “The Great Escape” as well.

Given an impressively vibrant 6K transfer to Blu-ray (plus an HD digital copy) as part of the Paramount Presents series of titles, "Last Train From Gun Hill" might feel like something of a forgotten western from the era. But like Matt stalking through the alternating reds, oranges, yellows, and dark shadows in order to get his men before things ignite, this is one film that's well worth tracking down.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Review: Blood on the Moon (1948)

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A stylized western that — with its shadowy cinematography from Out of the Past lensman Nicholas Musuaraca — has much more in common with Film Noir than the genre best epitomized by other 1948 releases Red River and Fort Apache, director Robert Wise's distaste for the western and determination to infuse his feature with gritty realism helps his unique Blood on the Moon straddle both worlds. A minor effort when compared to River and Apache by Howard Hawks and John Ford respectively, the largely forgotten Blood is given new life in this gorgeously crisp Blu-ray debut from Warner Archive, which arrives alongside another 1948 Robert Mitchum western, Rachel and the Stranger.

No stranger to Film Noir, including two shot by Musuaraca (Out of the Past and The Locket), the masculine complexity of the ego, id, and superego contained in the aura of Mitchum as soon as he enters the frame lends itself incredibly well to the existential side of the genre, which is pushed to the forefront of Moon. As Robert Wise recalls in the Robert Mitchum biography Baby, I Don't Care, this belief was also shared by Blood on the Moon star Walter Brennan, who Wise describes pointing a finger at the smoldering Mitchum on set and saying to friends, "that is the goddamndest realest cowboy I've ever seen."

Caught between two sides in a battle over land and cattle, after drifter turned hired gun Jim Garry (Mitchum) is enlisted to help his old trail driving partner Tate Riling (Robert Preston) in his war with rancher John Lufton (Tom Tully), he realizes he's been tricked into being a villain rather than a hero. Manipulating the ongoing battle between Lufton and local homesteaders, who foolishly believe that Riling is helping them in order to stand up for the underdog rather than just to position himself for power and glory, Blood on the Moon's warnings about the motives of aspiring leaders makes this film timelier than ever with its post-2016 release in an election year.

A house divided by loyalties in the form of Lufton's two daughters whom we discover have each pledged allegiance to a different side, after Mitchum gets involved with Barbara Bel Geddes — whom he first meets and flirts with by gunfire in a bananas sequence that uses a trick-shooting standoff as foreplay — he starts to reevaluate his position.

Adapted from the Luke Short novel Gunman's Chance by former script editor turned prolific Hollywood screenwriter Lillie Hayward, although there's nothing terribly original about the moral quandary laced narrative faced by Mitchum's Jim Garry on the page, Wise leans into the ambiguity heavily and turns this into a black, white, and shadowy tale of good and evil. Augmented by not only some bravura shootouts and stampedes but especially by its well-choreographed fight scenes, which foreshadow Wise's brilliant work directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music, although the former Orson Welles editor had helmed other pictures, you can tell how much the film he described as his "first big feature" meant to him when we watch Mitchum and Preston go ten rounds.

Not wanting "one of those extremely staged-looking fistfights used in all the movies where the stuntmen did this elaborate acrobatic fighting and you saw the real actors only in close-ups," he vowed to deliver a scene "with that awkward brutal look of a real fight," where "when it was done . . . the winner . . . [should] look as exhausted as the loser." Recalling Mitchum's excitement about the brawl, again in Baby, I Don't Care, Wise remarked that his leading man “probably knew more than I did about barroom fights like this one.” And while 1948 is a notorious year in Mitchum's life because incredibly, this film and Rachel and the Stranger did big business at the box office after his arrest and brief jail sentence for marijuana use, the films' success undoubtedly helped land him more roles in the genre he slipped into as naturally as a second skin.

A critical hit which scored well-earned raves from Variety and The New York Times, Blood on the Moon's unusually noirish approach to a western showed once again the amount of range exuded by its director. At the same time, of course, it also paints one fascinating portrait of Mitchum, reminding us that no matter what genre we see him in, he's always the most interesting thing onscreen, waging a battle over right and wrong that seems to flash in his eyes as one of "the goddamndest realest" complicated cinematic protagonists we've ever seen.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Review: Rachel and the Stranger (1948)

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Long before he looked at a woman's changing role in society after the advent of the sexual revolution and the Vietnam war found Jane Fonda's housewife in Coming Home questioning just which of two very different men she should be with, screenwriter Waldo Salt crafted another love triangle film that broke new ground in its no-nonsense depiction of a woman's role in society in the old west.

Adapted from the short story "Rachel" by Howard Fast, 1948's hit Rachel and the Stranger was one of the few westerns to take an honest look at the treatment of women who were bought and sold into indentured servitude.

A rough around the edges western with a sweet, slow burn love story at its center, the film from veteran RKO house director Norman Foster stars William Holden as Big Davey Harvey, a farmer in the market for a new wife and mother for his wild son (Gary Gray) after he loses his beloved bride to fever at age twenty-eight. Purchasing a new bride from the parson (played by Tom Tully), Big Davey is content to treat the "kinda thin but not bad lookin'" twenty-five year old Rachel (Loretta Young) like just a "bondwoman" but the parson tells him it wouldn't be proper for her to live with him unwed so Davey marries her out of Christian duty.

Uninterested in any kind of relationship because as far as he's concerned, he already had and lost the great love of his life, it's only when his friend Jim (Robert Mitchum) arrives, eyes the beautiful new woman, and offers to take her away that Davey gives her a second look and must figure out where he stands before it's too late.

Efficiently directed by Foster, whose background helming everything from Charlie Chan to Mr. Moto movies for RKO serves him well here as the love story moves into exciting western action territory in its final act, this fine character piece is elevated by the charisma of its leads, especially Young who imbues Rachel with an intelligence and mischief sorely needed by the otherwise straightforward plotline.

Given a few tongue-in-cheek lines which, for a majority of the film had been reserved for either Gray or Mitchum, Young has a terrific, still relatable moment when, after Mitchum asks her if she can play the spinet piano and Holden answers for her in the negative, she ignores it and admits she can. Startled by the discovery, Holden asks her why she never told him that before and she says simply, "you never asked," in a line read sure to hit home with women everywhere.

Lighting up in her eyes at Mitchum as he chides her with the inquiry, "is Big Dave the all-devastative and devoted husband he makes himself out to be?" Young's spark of interest lights a fire in the film, which, after struggling to absorb Holden's rudeness to his new wife, gets noticeably lighter whenever Mitchum enters the frame. And although he is a very supporting player in Rachel and the Stranger, his presence helps the work pick up the pace again after it threatened to go a little stagnant, thus ensuring Rachel never loses its way.

Working considerably well with the director, Loretta Young — who some believe started her famous swear jar for blasphemous curses on the set of this one for Holden and Mitchum — reteamed with Norman Foster a few years later on her TV series The Loretta Young Show, where he helmed twenty-nine episodes.

Rushed to theaters by RKO in order to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Robert Mitchum's marijuana drug bust and short jail sentence, much like 1948's other Mitchum starrer Blood on the Moon, Rachel and the Stranger turned a tidy profit for the studio.

A very welcome new take on the old west which dares not to sanitize the fact that women were bought and sold into slavery, although it's turned into a love story in Rachel, you have to give Salt, Fast, RKO, Foster, and Young credit for daring to explore this terrain in the first place. Given a marvelous transfer to Warner Archive Blu-ray, along with the unusually noirish western Blood on the Moon, which suggests that Mitchum was drawn to intriguing projects at the height of his fame, if you're looking for something that expands the western myth beyond riding and roping cowboys to include more of the female gender, this is one Stranger you'll be glad you brought home.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: The Kid (2019)

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Stripped down tales of good and evil where legends loom large and men even larger against backdrops of dust, no genre puts an actor on display quite like a western.

Cutting through artifice to show us the performer without their bag of tricks, just like it took watching Red River for John Ford to realize that the Duke could act, it wasn't until I saw Val Kilmer in Tombstone and Ben Foster in 3:10 to Yuma that I discovered just how crazily talented the two really are.

Stealing focus from the film's marquee stars, it was Ben Foster's feral performance as a Yuma villain in fact that came flooding back to mind shortly after I started The Kid and the film introduced us to its titular Billy the Kid played by Dane DeHaan.

A mesmerizing turn by an actor I've seen before (but now am sure I won't forget), whether he's spinning an epic yarn or escaping from custody in a scene just dripping with charisma, DeHaan sizes up and plays on his costars and the audience for maximum impact.

Directed by one of Generation X's most accomplished performers in the form of actor turned acting teacher and filmmaker Vincent D'Onofrio, although it's narratively forgettable, The Kid is an actor's picture all around.

Hoping to keep DeHaan from easily running away with it all, The Kid plugs a traditional coming-of-age storyline about a teenage boy's fight to save his sister from their evil uncle into the middle of the otherwise fact based standoff between Billy the Kid and the law.

With D'Onofrio's Newton Boys and Magnificent Seven costar Ethan Hawke wearing the badge as Sheriff Pat Garrett and elevating the film from some of its bland and predictable plot machinations, The Kid flirts with occasional greatness as first Garrett and later DeHaan's Kid recall the story of the first person they ever fatally shot.

Two thematically similar monologues in two different sections of the movie that — when performed by these stars — sound like two choruses to the same song, the script by 2010 Nicholl fellowship winner Andrew Lanham might revolve around a familiar arc but it's punctuated with bright spots.

Bolstered by promising newcomers Jake Schur and D'Onofrio's daughter Leila George as the two siblings on the run from their menacing uncle played to sneering, unrecognizable effect by D'Onofrio and Hawke's Magnificent Seven costar Chris Pratt, the film struggles to find a balance between its A and B plot.

Relegating the two characters we know the best to the sidelines while simultaneously strengthening them with great speeches and star power, The Kid seems as torn as Schur's character is regarding which man's side he wants to be on.

Helping to heighten excitement and quicken the pace at precisely the right time, during The Kid's bold escape from custody, editor Katharine McQuerrey cuts on action repeatedly. Beautifully lensed by Cop Car cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd, in the bravura sequence we follow DeHaan's character off a roof to the ground to the stirrups and over a horse in a series of inventive edits which give the film a much needed booster shot.

Pushing and pulling us from fact and fiction to and fro throughout, while we are never as fully invested in Schur's coming-of-age plight as I'm sure D'Onofrio (who helped conceive the premise) would have liked, The Kid's enviable star roster — especially MVP Dane DeHaan — ensures that our attention never strays from the old west for long.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: City Slickers (1991)

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Vacations are always better when, as comedy screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel note, "you know who you're taking a trip with" and this is especially true when you're asking an audience of strangers around the world to come along.

Passionate about telling a character-driven story "even in a high-concept comedy" like City Slickers, which was based on an idea Billy Crystal dreamed up while watching a TV show about fantasy vacations, Ganz and Mandel take the time to develop the characters beyond the recognizable men bringing them to life.

Centered on three lifelong friends comprised of Crystal's neurotic Mitch, Daniel Stern's mild-mannered pushover Phil, and Bruno Kirby's obligatory, macho alpha male Ed, Slickers opens during the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain which puts their lives and relationship to the test in what we discover is just the latest in a long line of wild excursions.

Though broadly comic at first glance, the sequence works well on another level beyond simply establishing who the leads are as we begin to foreshadow what conflicts the three might need to resolve over the course of what's been far too often dismissed as a midlife crisis comedy (when in truth taking inventory of one’s life can happen at any age).

"It's never enough for you," an injured Mitch tells Ed after conceding that not only are their "adventures becoming stupid" but, as his patient wife Barbara (Patricia Wettig) notes, perhaps these trips "are a desperate attempt to cling to" their youth.

Keeping his head down for a year until the annual depression of his birthday sets in, after a catastrophic start to his thirty-ninth year leads to problems at work, a breakdown at Career Day after his son tells classmates he's a submarine commander, and a major blow up between Phil and his domineering wife (which magnifies his recent malaise), Barbara practically pushes Mitch out the door.

A present from Phil and Ed, this time the destination takes the three to New Mexico. Hoping to fulfill his childhood dream to be cowboy "Mitchie the Kid," they set off to drive a herd of cattle up to Colorado alongside a father/son duo of dentists from Baltimore, a pair of brothers who run a bestselling ice cream company, and a beautiful woman whose friend bailed at the last minute.

And while this is when the action truly begins, from a narrative perspective it's important to realize that – by the time they've landed – nearly an entire act has gone by where we've formed a solid foundation with the characters, which doesn't often happen today in films that would instead prefer to start in the middle to cater to the shortest of attention spans.

Using Jack Palance's iconic performance in Shane as the inspiration for his Academy award-winning role as Curly the intimidating Trail Boss who, as Mitch says "the toughest man I've ever seen in my life," the New Yorker's mile-a-minute one-liners and stampede causing portable coffee maker initially rubs Curly the wrong way.

Butting heads from the start, once Mitch stands up to him after apologizing for his earlier jokes, Palance's cowboy becomes a surprising source of enigmatic wisdom to Mitch and as such, helps the viewer take Slickers more seriously as a western than spoof.

Comparing the "City Slickers" to Curly, as Ganz and Mandel opine in one of this Shout Select edition's many behind-the-scenes featurettes, one of their biggest challenges as screenwriters was that in reality, "these characters had no business being in his world."

Raising the stakes as well as decreasing the number of talented actors onscreen (including David Paymer and Helen Slater), the writers treated it like an Agatha Christie style murder mystery in order to drop the ensemble down from eleven people to our main three organically. And illustrating just how much has happened along the way, by the time it becomes another one of Mitch, Phil, and Ed's legitimate adventures, we realize that we aren't riding alongside the same three men we first met back in Spain.

In other words, all the time spent inviting us "to move in with the characters" ensured that rather than a mere gimmicky western comedy, midlife crisis movie, or fish-out-of-water story, we're watching a tale about three men who learn that rather than to try to recapture their youth, it's time to grow up into the men they really want to be.

Featuring terrific performances by its impressive cast including the many supporting players who each get the chance to steal at least one scene, in the end it's Palance, Crystal, Kirby, and especially Stern who do a great job of balancing out pathos and drama with the comedy as leads.

Inventively directed by Ron Underwood, who punctuates some of the jokes by reframing them in a western homage that makes them even funnier as in a memorable ode to Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the newly released 4K scanned print on Shout's Blu-ray showcases the film's beauty while also giving Underwood, Crystal, and Stern an audio commentary track.

And although some of the bonus featurettes get repetitive as they reuse interview clips under different headings – making you wonder if they should've just served up one long featurette – overall the quality of the bonus material on this disc is first rate.

Featuring two deleted scenes that would've changed the ending of the movie, with Underwood explaining why they were left on the cutting room floor in tandem with Ganz and Mandel's reflections on how to not only set up a character-driven storyline but also go against viewer expectations by shifting tone and emphasis, we're able to appreciate just how much work went into creating this contemporary classic.

That being said, admittedly it's a film I didn't connect with all that much upon its initial release mostly because as a child, I couldn't relate to much beyond Crystal's one-liners or moments of broad situational humor.

However, now that I'm roughly the same age as the film's characters, it proved to be an ideal time to revisit the work that inspired my favorite Academy Awards ceremony of all time, as Crystal started improvising jokes about his costar's strength and virility after Palance won his award.

Unlike too many generic contemporary comedies sure to be forgotten as soon as the credits roll, City Slickers holds up remarkably well twenty-seven years later, undoubtedly because not only do we know our characters, they're people we still recognize today, whether running from a bull, freaking out on their birthday, or riding the range.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement Blu-ray Review: The Great Silence (1968)

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Giving new meaning to the phrase “close but no cigar,” word is that when Twentieth Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck reached the end of Sergio Corbucci's darkly subversive 1968 Spaghetti Western The Great Silence, he was rendered so speechless by the film's bleak ending that he swallowed the cigar he'd been smoking in absolute shock.

Unwilling to distribute the stark, anti-authoritarian picture in the United States (even after Corbucci was asked to shoot two new thankfully unused conclusions), Zanuck relegated Silence to a foreign release. And Corbucci's film did fairly well everywhere but its native Italy where – like Zanuck – one Sicilian viewer was so upset by the final showdown that he fired his gun in anger directly at the movie screen.

A revisionist take on the genre's classic Shane style paradigm wherein good triumphs over evil once a polite cowboy rides into town and sets things right, in Silence, A Man and a Woman actor Jean-Louis Trintignant saddles up for duty as the film's mute gunfighter-for-hire title lead.

Newly arrived in Snow Hill, Utah, Trintignant's Silence finds himself quickly caught up in a two-sided conflict. Turning the convention of "bad" outlaws and "good" bounty hunters on its head, in The Great Silence, the turf war is between a group of outlaws – many of whom committed petty crimes in order to give their loved ones something to eat – and the "bounty killers" who make a living getting away with murder plus a reward by gaming the system of killing in the name of (forced) self defense.

The brutality of the film's bounty killers led by Klaus Kinski's sadistic Loco (whose character was partly inspired by Boris Karloff's vampire in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath), as well as its message of political and judicial corruption are apparent right from the start of what Repo Man filmmaker and knowledgeable genre scholar Alex Cox has dubbed "the most pessimistic western of all time."

Reflecting the off-screen violence of 1968 – and the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X in particular – by subverting the genre that he treasured but had recently felt growing stale as a storyteller, Corbucci set out to make his own snowy homage to John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn and Andre DeToth's Day of the Outlaw.

Filmed in the Italian Dolomites as opposed to the traditional Spaghetti locale of Spain, Corbucci's opus opens with a sea of white as far as the eye can see. Augmented by twenty-six tons of shaving cream, the snowy visual scope not only matches Silence's melancholic tone but, contrasted by its dark sets and costumes, it punctuates the film's bursts of red blood and black gunfire that much more.

And similar to the way that a memorable match cut of a flame is employed to take us from the present to a flashback – from Ennio Morricone's simpler and relatively downbeat score to the brutal (and occasionally blurry) beauty of Silvano Ippoliti's cinematography – everything in Silence foreshadows the eventual literal and metaphorical darkness to come.

Worthy of endless analysis from political to religious to Freudian to moral, the revolutionary work makes brilliant use of a genre that lends itself so well to subtext.

Breaking new ground, although relatively chaste, Silence notably features Corbucci's one and only love scene. Serving as a powerful step in the right direction in terms of gender and racial equality, not only is the romantic moment initiated by its female lead (after she's given a firm no to someone else) but by featuring a white actor and black actress in the form of Trintignant and talented newcomer Vonetta McGee it's also interracial in nature. And although Corbucci had no interest in filming another, by using love instead of war, Silence's brief moment of tenderness might've broken down walls that violence wouldn't breach in movies to come.

For decades only a cult film here in the United States, now thanks to Film Movement, The Great Silence has at last been given a gorgeous 2k restoration and theatrical release in time for its fiftieth anniversary. As loaded with bonus features as Corbucci's film is with symbolism, the brand new Blu-ray and DVD editions of Silence boast a terrific essay from film critic Simon Abrams, the two unused alternate endings, a commentary featurette with Alex Cox, as well as the 1988 Spaghetti Western documentary Westerns, Italian Style and more, although the main draw remains the film itself.

Visually reminiscent of Robert Altman's own subversive 1971 western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Great Silence also served as a major influence on Quentin Tarantino's work. Yet despite the fact that Corbucci paid homage to multiple films in just as many genres, in terms of how to make a Spaghetti Western set in the late 1800s relevant to those in the late 1960s, in the end, Corbucci was far more inspired by events playing out in the news than he was by art.

A fascinating watch, now with the Trump Administration working to game the system, escape justice, and dial us back to Old West era laws, eerily some of the political arguments and warnings in Corbucci's classic have become timelier than ever. Just like the flame in the film that flicks us from present to past, The Great Silence shows us that although things have changed, when it comes to where we ultimately want to be as a country, we're still close but no cigar. Yet even though it holds up a startling mirror to society, maybe instead of feeling defeated by the ending, we can just worry about right now and keep fighting for what's right.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.