NFR Project: 'The Wind' (1928)

The Wind

Dir: Victor Sjostrom

Scr: Frances Marion

Pho: John Arnold

Ed: Conrad A. Nervig

Premiere: November 23, 1928

95 min./78 min.

The Wind is an amazing picture of a mind falling apart.

The great actress Lillian Gish selected the material to be filmed, calling upon the talents of Swedish director Victor Sjostrom and actor Lars Hanson, whom she had worked with before on The Scarlet Letter (1926). It was to be her last silent film, and one of her best.

In it, she plays Letty, a demure Virginia girl who is transplanted by necessity to the barren landscape of Texas, in a zone where the wind buffets the desert constantly. She is taken in by her cousin, but his jealous wife drives her out and into the arms of the willing Lige Hightower (Hanson). She marries him of necessity, but repels his advances. He promises not to touch her, and vows to earn enough money to send her back East.

Into the cabin comes the wounded Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), a cad who earlier offered to make Letty his mistress. While the men of the region ride off during a brutal “norther” storm to herd wild horses, Roddy returns to Letty’s cabin and rapes her.

In the morning, he tries to make her leave with him, but she shoots him and kills him. The wind blows incessantly as she digs a shallow grave in the sand outside. She buries him . . . and the wind moves the sand away, exposing the corpse. And Letty slowly goes mad.

John Arnold’s photography is exemplary – this film’s universe is choked with dust and grit. Sjostrom makes the wide-open plains suffocating and smothering, boxing Letty in mentally until she loses it. And Gish, in her final silent film, shows why she was so accomplished an actress. She underplays her fluctuating mental state, when it would have been so easy to go over the top, and gives us a portrait of a personality under siege.

Now, in the source novel, Letty goes mad and wander off into the storm to die. The studio insisted on a happy ending, so one is more or less tacked on, in a fairly trite and obvious way. None of the people involved with the film were satisfied with this turn of events. Sjostrom went back to Sweden, and Gish prepared for a new career -- in sound film.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: With Car and Camera Around the World.