Jean-Louis Trintignant as Gordon/"Silence" in 'The Great Silence' Image via 20th Century Studios By Erik Hawkins Published Aug 12, 2026, 11:03 PM EDT Erik Hawkins is an award-winning writer and editor who's been obsessed with cinema since he was old enough to hold Roger Ebert's Video Home Companion in his hands. He lives in NYC, where he rabidly watches everything from the newest releases to the more odd and obscure, and regularly shares his thoughts on Letterboxd. From ghost-writing fiction and webisodes in South America to local news, trial coverage, and politics in NYC, he's rarely put down his laptop over the past 15 years. Sign in to your Collider account Add Us Add on Google Preferred Source Google News Like Like follow Follow followed Followed Listen Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap Aside from Sergio Leone himself, few knew the spaghetti Western genre in their bones like Sergio Corbucci . Director of the original Django , which spawned a lengthy franchise and served as inspiration for Quentin Tarantino , Corbucci also helmed Burt Reynolds ' Navajo Joe and the blackly comedic The Mercenary, and his sardonic, bullet-riddled style rarely flagged. But Corbucci's undisputed masterpiece is 1968's The Great Silence . Full of breathtaking snowy photography shot in the alpine regions of Italy and an equally breathtaking Ennio Morricone score, and laden with hard-eyed violence, this film would also prove irresistible to Tarantino , who called it "my favorite snow Western, one of the great nihilistic spaghetti Westerns, done by one of my favorite directors" — and borrowed heavily from its imagery for The Hateful Eight .
For decades, though, American audiences were unable to experience Corbucci's vision , as stateside studio heads here were reportedly horrified by the film's violence and grim ending. It took until 2001 for a DVD release to reach the U.S., but even that was marred by a poor transfer. Finally, in 2018, Film Movement released a gorgeous 2K version of the film to Blu-Ray and DVD, and that transfer is now finally available to stream in its pristine, uncut glory on MUBI.
Jean-Louis Trintignant riding a horse through the snow in The Great Silence Image via 20th Century Fox While a number of Westerns have taken place (at least partially) in snowy environments, nothing out there looks like The Great Silence . Corbucci's command of space, color, and tone make his standard widescreen compositions of the snowy landscape look titanic and terrifying, with his tiny, bundled gunmen struggling against the elements in an ocean of white. The almost literally black-and-white look also lends an irony to the film's morality, which is markedly more complex and nakedly political than that of your average spaghetti Western.
Watching any outdoor scene in Tarantino's The Hateful Eight , it's impossible to ignore the visual and tonal cues he took from Corbucci. In a 2016 video essay , Little White Lies writer Adam Cook noted individual shots that are virtual mirrors of each other in the two films — a list that includes not only outdoor shots, but those of characters bouncing along inside of stagecoaches.
While The Hateful Eight is an overall more cynical enterprise than The Great Silence , and more full of backstabbing than historical myth-making, between its setting, individual shots, and Ennio Morricone score (Tarantino r…