Vento e Areia

What struck me most about this film is how it achieved by purely visual means to evoke the threatening nature of the environment in which the female lead (Letty Mason, played by Lillian Gish) finds herself. The way the wind drives the sand and pushes against windows and doors and the very walls of the cabin makes it look and feel truly frightening. Lillian Gish is fantastic as an initially weak young woman who arrives in this environment as a total stranger, is hated by a woman on whom she depends and deceived by a man who (seemingly) offers to marry her, but who nevertheless finds inner strength in the end. 'The Wind' is a truly haunting film with an optimistic ending. Highly recommended!

This is quite simply one of the handful of greatest achievements in the history of visual storytelling. There are images as fresh, as inventive as any you will ever see. You may find some of Gish's emoting a little over the top, but immediately there follow moments when she is as subtle and complex as anyone who came after her. She did, after all, invent screen acting as we now know it. One may wish for the original ending Gish and Sjostrom wanted; but the final images as re-shot were still created by artists at the height of their respective powers, and are memorable in their own right. The desert wind lives and howls in this film, as it has done only rarely in films by John Ford and David Lean. Anyone who doubts that cinema is art has never seen The Wind.

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.

Really awesome silent film about a young woman who finds herself at the mercy of people who use and abuse her. With no way to get home, stranded in the mojave desert, Lillian Gish has maybe her best role. The special affects are astounding. The ending is very poor, however. Lillian Gish herself talks about how they insisted a sad ending would ruin her career, even though her films all had sad endings in the past and she was a huge star! She herself, hated the ending they made. Just ignore it and think about how great the whole rest of the film is!

Lillian Gish plays her usual virginal character thrown into adverse and unjust circumstances, but here she does so much with the part as we watch her slowly unravel and lose her mind. She plays Letty, a girl from Virginia who comes to live with relatives in a dust bowl town. The atmosphere into which she travels doesn't make sense in many ways. The people there supposedly make their living from cattle ranching, but with the constant sandstorms I don't see how anything is supposed to survive in such an environment. However, that is not really the point. The constant wind and storms are just metaphors for Letty's own mental state and feeling of entrapment. Her cousin's wife is hostile to her from the start, convinced that Letty wants to take her husband away from her, and eventually forces her out of the home. As a result she marries a man she doesn't love, and once this is clear to him he accepts the situation and makes it a goal to raise enough money to send Letty back to Virginia where she will be happy. On top of this there is the constant specter of a wealthy married man who wants to take Letty's virtue for the recreation of it all.

The visual work on this film is spectacular, much like Murnau's "Sunrise" except in reverse - this film starts out on an upbeat note with Letty looking forward to the new direction her life has turned, and it being all downhill from there. Thus we come to the familiar topic of the abrupt upbeat ending and how it didn't make any sense in the context of the rest of the film. It was an early example of studio suits interfering with the artistic vision of the filmmakers, and so upset director Victor Sjostrom that he never directed another film in America.

Like Murnau's "Sunrise" and "The Crowd", 1928's "The Wind" is an example of silent film-making at its peak. This level of art in movies would be lost at the dawn of sound until the problems with the static camera could be overcome and the novelty of sound wore off to the extent that plot and meaningful dialog became important. The first problem - technical - was remedied much more quickly than the second problem, which was largely a matter of psychology and experience.

Highly recommended for silent film fans.