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The title is curiously evocative of Chandler's big sleep, the deathly void is not a rocky desert but gelid wastes (cp. De Toth's Day of the Outlaw). Snow Hill, Utah, in the year of the Great Blizzard, a junction for the business of bounty hunting: "It's our bread and butter, you understand," declares the head mercenary (Klaus Kinski) to the mother of the youth he's just shot down. Silence the gunfighter (Jean-Louis Trintignant), "faster than the devil" but canny enough to fire only in self-defense, less a moral matter than a legal one. (Neck stubble conceals slashed vocal chords, the solitary glimpse of greenery materializes during a recollection of his childhood trauma.) The justice of peace (Luigi Pistilli) puts prices on heads and gets his cut of the reward, the new sheriff (Frank Wolff) keeps trying to convince himself there's some difference between a hired killer and a servant of the law. "An amusin' day" in Sergio Corbucci's West, the stagecoach has frozen corpses stacked on top and the majestic horse in the wilderness is nothing but a source of meat. "Since when are wolves afraid of wolves?" Contract employees and private operators and commiserating showgirls, a most severe distillation of Leone's view of brutish capitalism a few years ahead of Altman's Presbyterian Church. The doleful poetry of it rests with the young widow (Vonetta McGee) who hires the silent triggerman and finds their bond growing from partners in a vengeful transaction to tragic outsiders, both of them denied their voices in a nascent society. Classification of blood is a key motif, the community of starving bandits descends from the mountains like Char's lepers, "lente neige" and all. "A patriotic duty" for the bleak coda, remembered by Cimino in Heaven's Gate before Tarantino's major overhaul (The Hateful Eight). With Mario Brega, Marisa Merlini, Spartaco Conversi, and Raf Baldassarre.
--- Fernando F. Croce |