Il Grande silenzio/The Big Silence (Italy, 1968)

(Opening credit sequence with great title music.) Although he made more than enough crappy films during his active years as a one-man, non-stop Italian film factory, at his best Sergio Corbucci ranks up there with Sergio Leone as one of the makers of some of the greatest Spaghetti westerns ever. Alongside his other masterpiece Django (1966), The Big Silence is probably Corbucci’s best film in the genre. Without a doubt, it is also one of the most disheartening westerns ever to be made anywhere, which might explain why it was never made it to the USA, which generally prefers its westerns sanitized.
Deep in the snowbound mountains of Utah, the amoral, psychopathic bounty hunter Loco (Klaus Kinksi) likes to kill before he captures, and often lugs around a variety of dead bodies which he plans to eventually turn over for the rewards. (Those he cannot take with him, he buries in snow mounds to come back for later.) Across his path rides Silenzio (Jean Louis Trintignant), a quick-draw killer of bounty hunters, forever silent since his childhood, after some nasty men, having killed his wanted Daddy and defenseless Mommy in front of him, slit his vocal cords. A truly great, depressing spaghetti western set in a snow-bound hell....
Had Albert Camus written westerns instead of novels, he would have written movies like this one. (The ending for the Japanese market, an extra on the current DVD, makes the film a philosophical joke.)