6. The Great Silence
Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence is a haunting, unsettling and altogether elegaic piece of work that's acted as a huge stylistic influence on many contemporary directors, most pertinently Quentin Tarantino. The Great Silence is set in the snowy mountain ranges of Utah; a setting which Tarantino pays a direct and uncharacteristically humble homage to in Django Unchained. Corbucci's film explores a growing feud between two bounty hunters, the eponymous Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and his insidious counterpart Loco (played by the superbly unnerving Klaus Kinski). Silence is hired to kill Loco by the grieving widow of one of his victims. Silence hates bounty hunters having seen his parents murdered at the hands of them as a child, so he treks through the snowy mountain passes dispatching the swarm of 'guns for hire' who are murdering innocents in the false name of the law until he finds himself face to face with Loco. Based loosely on a true story, Corbucci's film is concerned with unveiling the inherent criminality behind the trade of bounty hunting and as such gains a political edge that usually isn't explored within the genre. The Great Silence's violent and uncompromisingly bleak ending, which hearkens to its factual narrative basis, leaves a firm imprint of the film in one's psyche that cements its status as one of the finest Westerns ever made.