GOLDEN GRAHAMS

Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham unearths underrated classics…

THIS MONTH

Day of the Outlaw and The Great Silence

Yee-haw! As Kevin Costner’s two-part epic western Horizon: An American Saga gallops towards cinemas – and with temperatures hitting -4°C as I write this column in mid January – I find my mind returning to a pair of snowy oaters that aren’t talked about nearly enough.

André De Toth’s Day of the Outlaw (1959) and Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (1968) are both cold and brutal. In Outlaw, cattleman Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) is furious that homesteader Hal Crane (Alan Marshal) has fenced off land he wishes to drive his beasts over. Tensions are further cranked up by Hal being married to Blaise’s former lover, Helen (Tina Louise). But their dispute suddenly seems small fry when a gang of outlaws led by one-time army captain Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives) ride into the isolated town of Bitters in the Oregan hills, intent on using it – and the four women among its tiny population – for R&R.

The Great Silence, meanwhile, is set in Utah Territory during the Great Blizzard of 1899. Hired by a crooked banker, vicious bounty hunter Loco (Werner Herzog’s best fiend, Klaus Kinski) has forced some Mormons into hiding in the mountains. But gunslinger Silence (French acting legend Jean-Louis Trintignant) is intent on righting this injustice. For him it’s personal: bounty hunters slit his vocal cords when he was a child, after he’d watched them kill his parents.

In both films, aman stands up to a group of bad guys, but neither man is heroic. Moral ambivalence coats all, like the snow that shrouds the land. French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier called Outlaw ‘a western that reinvents the genre in a revolutionary way’, and so it does, with its stripped-down style, sparse furnishings and lack of positive values. Even the obligatory dance sequence – a staple of the genre, which normally allows for a burst of ebullience – is oppressively shot, the outlaws spinning the women around and around as the scene teeters towards sexual violence.

The Great Silence is even darker. ‘It really has a claim to be just about the best spaghetti western of all time, and that’s in spite of the wonderful films of Sergio Leone,’ said filmmaker Alex Cox. Corbucci also made Django, which is more famous, but this is his masterwork. For while it’s far rougher around the edges than the rigorous Day of the Outlaw – there’s crude shaky cam and jarring zooms – it’s a film of tremendous power, scored, hauntingly, by Ennio Morricone, and boasting one of the bleakest endings in not just westerns but all of cinema. Here, one man can’t change things, à la High Noon. Law and order is corrupt, the social order is foul. Like Sam Peckinpah’s western The Wild Bunch, released the next year, there’s a gonzo gore climax that owes much to the imagery being beamed into homes from the Vietnam War. But unlike The Wild Bunch, there’s no romanticism, no release.

And all the while, the snow, like the death and despair, just keeps coming down. In fact, so harsh were the shooting conditions of Outlaw, the crew demanded ‘danger money’. De Toth responded by stripping off his coat and sweaters and wading out to shoot bare-chested. That’s how tough these films are. But worth it. So wrap up warm and wade right in.

JAMIE WILL RETURN NEXT ISSUE… FOR MORE RECOMMENDATIONS, FOLLOW @JAMIE_GRAHAM9 ON X.