Saturday Matinee: The Great Silence

Source: Kanopy

On an unforgiving, snow swept frontier, a group of bloodthirsty bounty hunters, led by the vicious Loco (Klaus Kinski) prey on a band of persecuted outlaws who have taken to the hills.

As the price on each head is collected one-by-one, only a mute gunslinger named Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant, The Conformist) stands between the innocent refugees and the greed and corruption that the bounty hunters represent. But, in this harsh, brutal world, the lines between right and wrong aren’t always clear and good doesn’t always triumph.

Featuring superb photography and a haunting score from maestro Ennio Morricone, director Sergio Corbucci’s bleak, brilliant and violent vision of an immoral, honorless west is widely considered to be among the very best and most influential Euro-Westerns ever made.

“…the film’s masterful imagery…and inventive Ennio Morricone score are spectacular…” – Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times

Must be a member of a major public or university library to watch here: https://www.kanopy.com/wayf/product/great-silence-0

Running Time
106 mins
Year
1968

Saturday Matinee: Le Orme (aka Footprints on the Moon)

From Archive.org:

“Le Orme” (a/k/a “Footprints on the Moon” and “Primal
Impulse”) has been described variously as an Italian giallo, a sci-fi film, a
mystery, or a psychological thriller. Ultimately, it defies pigeonholing.

It stars Florinda Bolkan as Alice Cespi, a professional
translator, who is tormented by a recurring nightmare; in it, a lunar-landing
team deliberately abandons a colleague on the moon’s surface as part of a scientific
experiment.

Alice arrives for work one day and is summarily canned. The
reason? She’d walked out of an international astronomy conference and disappeared
for three days, incommunicado.

Those three days are a complete blank for her. Alice finds a
few vague clues — a torn postcard from Garma, a resort she’s never visited; an
earring, a unfamiliar bloody yellow dress that fits her perfectly — and sets out
to learn what has happened.

When she arrives in Garma, all of the strangers are
delighted to see her “again” — but claim that she’s another person entirely. And that’s
just the beginning…

Although the storytelling in “Le Orme” is fairly linear, it’s also disorienting — so you’ll
have to pay attention to it. There are blind alleys, red herrings and
(possibly) misleading implications throughout.

Cast includes Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi, and a cameo by Klaus Kinski.

Titles and credits are in Italian, but all dialogue is in English.