The Wind

Peculiar, but brilliantly filmed silent classic starring Gish as a young woman who battles for her life as she lives in the windy Texas desert, and is torn between two men who want her. Special effects are quite breathtaking for its time and since it was filmed in the scorching Mojave Desert in California.

I've watched The Wind several times, and I am convinced that it is one of the greatest movies ever. It is certainly the best silent western, and Lillian Gish has never been so profound as she is here.

What lifts it to the rank of a masterpiece is the passion of the direction and camera-work, and it certainly shows the advantage in having a mature artist like director Victor Sjöström. The central character is, as promised, the wind, and the raw power of nature supersedes the melodrama. You become engulfed in the tempests and hurricanes, and it is only to easy to understand that they might drive the young lady mad.

Lillian Gish also does a magnificent job; her usual overacting is actually appropriate for this role, as the powerful cinematic images have established the likeliness that she is falling to pieces. This surely has to be her greatest performance. Dorothy Cumming is also equally powerful as the embittered "other woman", one of the most evil characters to be found in a western. The other actors are adequate and satisfying without rising to the level of genius. Their acting is natural and unforced, unlike most silents.

It definitely gains from being a silent movie, all that dialogue would become a distraction if we had to listen to it. It helps that Thames Silents Orchestra has composed a beautiful and moving soundtrack, one that would sound good on a CD recording.

If you have any appreciation for silent film, rush out and get this one today!

PS Everyone seems to hate the studio-imposed ending, including Gish herself. Well, they are wrong! The Wind was going to end with Gish escaping the bad guy's advances by fleeing into a sandstorm and perishing...typical Victorian tragic melodrama, the sort of thing spoofed by Chaplin and other comedians.

What we get instead is considerably more complex and interesting, and contains some of the best scenes in the movie. I won't give the credit to the studio execs who demanded the revised ending; obviously, Sjöström was a genius who knew how to work wonders with whatever material he was given.

If you want to know how powerful, lyrical and emotive silent movies could be in their last days, just see Murnau's "Sunrise" and this absolute masterpiece, "The Wind". In both you quickly forget the absence of sound and come to enjoy it. Without voices' distraction, you're able to full appreciate the beautiful direction and photographic work, as well as Lilian Gish's wonderful interpretation - she should have won the first Oscar for best actress on a tie with Janet Gaynor. 1927 could be the last year for silent movies yet it was the greatest one, so that one wonders along with current reviewers if talkies were not a regress rather than a progress, after all.

An awesome, dark & atmospheric film. Gish is superb as the fragile Letty driven to the brink of madness by the incessant wind whipping up the sand. Her portrayal, with her wide staring eyes & tensing hands as the madness threatens to overwhelm her is stunning. The film takes its time to establish its characters, with a constant backdrop of the menace of the environment & also the danger of violence & the descent into madness, building to a thundering & almost unbearably tense experience with the actual sand storm itself. A true classic of the silent era capturing a performer at the peak of her powers-the image of Letty staring wide eyed through the window as the sand uncovers the body will stay with you.

The outstanding atmosphere makes this classic melodrama especially memorable. The story and the acting would have made a pretty good movie by themselves, but it is "The Wind" itself that makes it something more. Not only is the constant presence of the wind a well-conceived figurative parallel to the events in the characters' lives, but making it work on the screen was also a remarkable technical achievement for its era.

Lillian Gish is deservedly praised for her role as Letty, a young woman from the east who travels to a strange and unforgiving region. This is the kind of role that Gish always seemed born to play. But Lars Hanson also does an excellent job in an even more difficult role. In order for the story to work, Hanson has to make his character fully sympathetic to the audience, while at the same time making it plausible that Gish's character does not care for him very much.

It's still very impressive the way that the powerful prairie winds are made such an indispensable part of the movie. It must have involved a great deal of work and sacrifice to achieve such realism without fancy technology. And it is masterful the way that the howling, never-ceasing winds are used to parallel the conflicts among the characters. This is one of the fine classics of the silent era that should not be missed.