10 Criminally Underrated Westerns You Must See Before You Die
9. The Great Silence
20th Century Fox
The Great Silence, much like Death Rides a Horse, is a seminal western of the 1960s. Like that film it's also overlooked, despite the influence its had on the genre since its release, including on Quentin Tarantino's snowcapped thriller, The Hateful Eight.
Set during the Great Blizzard of 1899, Sergio Corbucci's film is violent, ruthless and stunning in equal measure, and features Jean-Louis Trintigant in the eponymous role of 'Silence', a man left mute following his parents' assassination and one determined to exact his revenge. To claim this story was typical of the genre would be to ignore the film's unique qualities though, with the snowy Utah climate juxtaposing nicely with the arid settings most westerns tend to feature.
There's more to Corbucci's classic than its winter setting though, because it actually reverses one of the genre's biggest tropes. This time around, the bounty hunters are the villains, and it's up to Silence and his Mauser (a unique weapon for the time) to set the record straight.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
