MovieChat Forums > Il grande silenzio (1969) Discussion > Romance between Silence and Paulina was ...

Romance between Silence and Paulina was weakest detail


Seemed to far fetched. He’s a all-business mute who would have not taken so much interest in a woman. And Paulina had just lost her husband, so there should have been mourning

I also feel that there wasn’t enough time for the romance. At the end, Paulina says “I love you” which made me roll my eyes because she hardly knew him.

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She made passionate love to him in one scene, which tells me she loved him.

It was a remote area of the Rockies in the Old West and Paulina had just lost her husband. She was grieving and needed companionship, human warmth. The gunfighter Silence comes along as the hero who (she hopes) is going to grant her a sense of justice in the situation and she allows him to sleep in the loft. Within a few days she's in love with this strong, silent type and vice versa. She's a beautiful woman, he's a handsome man and the chemistry was right.

Doesn't sound farfetched to me.

Also keep in mind that things have to be condensed in movies to fit into a 2-hour frame (in this case, 1 hour, 45 minutes), which includes the story arc of romantic relationships.

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I think there is a lot of truth to what you say here. She was in a bad situation and wanted to feel comfort and safety.

In my opinion it’s an absolutely great film and creepy Kinski was perfect for his role.

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Yeah, Kinski made for a really 'good' villain. And you can't beat the wintery milieu. It's strange that more Westerns didn't use the setting (no doubt because it's more difficult to shoot scenes in snowy conditions). There are only a handful that I can think of and some of em' only have a wintery scene or two: "Ride the High Country," "Breakheart Pass," "Jeremiah Johnson," "A Man Called Sledge" and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," along with later ones like "North Star," "The Claim," "Seraphim Falls" and "The Hateful Eight." There are a few of others of course.

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I think the location for the film came about because Corbucci wanted to go snow skiing.

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That's funny.

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Coming back to this topic, I recently listened to a podcast about Corbucci, and someone commented that he had wanted to do a western set in the snow as far back as Django (1966). Everyone had advised him as to the difficulties of that kind of shoot and he decided not to try it in that film. Instead they sprayed water on the dirt to create mud, giving it a look that also isn’t seen often in spaghetti westerns.

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The next year, the underrated "A Man Called Sledge" opened with a wintery sequence (shot in Almeria).

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I’ve never heard of this one, but what an unexpected director and cast for a spaghetti western!

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There's a lot of snowy Spaghetti Westerns if you count all the "White Fang" movies they made around the same time. I also think they did a few Westerns set in Canada with mounties (such as one Aristide Massaccessi did called "The Red Coat") but unfortunately most of them are very obscure.

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I do have the White Fang ones on VHS and DVD, and I like them. I’ve read up on Red Coat with Fabio Tessi, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see it yet. What do you think of it?

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I have yet to see that one as well, plus I hear there's a bunch of White Fang movies beyond the two Franco Nero and the one Maurizio Merli one. There's at least two that Alfonso Brescia did for instance, though it might be an instance of one actual movie being filmed and being split into two via stock footage.

All of the above are sadly rare and missing out on anything better than VHS-transfer level budget DVD releases.

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