Silent Tongue DVD Review:

Before River Phoenix’s untimely death he made this final film, Silent Tongue, which has now been released for the first time on DVD. This western is one of the rare films that you find on DVD, and wonder why they ever transferred it. In the case of Silent Tongue the reason must have been Phoenix and only Phoenix. Because this was his last film it is worth a viewing, but not much should be expected beyond that historical experience. Silent Tongue is an untraditional western, with plenty of gunshots but none of which aimed at any men, loads of Indians which don’t fight unless they are already dead, and a dark story of unsavory characters with little direction. In other words, it isn’t very good.

This surreal western takes place on Llano Estacado in 1873 as a traveling band of circus freaks and clowns try and swindle small towns out of their money by selling an elixir. This band is run by Eamon McCree (Alan Bates) and his son (Dermot Mulroney). McCree is a slimy human who has already sold one of his half-breed daughters to a faithful father, Prescott Roe (Richard Harris), who has suddenly returned to purchase the other. Roe’s son Talbot (River Phoenix) has fallen into madness at the death of his wife, McCree’s daughter, and Roe has the hopes that by bringing him a new wife he will return to sanity. The spirit of the dead wife is out for revenge as well, angry that she was bought like cattle.

This strange tale has so many characters all attempting to achieve something different it is difficult to distinguish what the point of all the madness is. In the end the film seems to favor the Indian girls, both dead and alive, although the spirit of the dead one has a strange demise that doesn’t seem quite fulfilling.

Whether the film is a masterpiece or an odd and confused work, the video transfer of the film is one of the worst I have seen in a long time. For a film which is only ten years old it should not look as bad as it does. There are marks all over the print where it isn’t just plain grainy. Absolutely no care seems to have been taken with transferring this to DVD and it still looks about as good as VHS. The audio is slightly better, but is still sub-par.

The features are also very sparse as is the DVD menu. All that the film claims is English closed captioning, scene selection, and 2.0 Dolby Stereo for this full screen version of the film. It is almost as if they took the transfer straight from a VHS copy of the film.

If you haven’t already seen the film, I wouldn’t recommend it, and if you have seen it and you love it, VHS is about the same and cheaper.



Ryan Izay