Le vent

Lillian Gish's legendary career was nearly as lengthy as her life. Time and time again, she has shown audiences that she was truly one of the finest actresses who ever lived. A perfect example of her power and artistry is in "The Wind".

Miss Gish plays "Letty", a young girl from Virginia who moves to her cousin's house on the wild, open plains of Texas. The plot is very interesting and very fluid. Miss Gish is wonderful as usual (the sequence of events at the end of the movie is among the finest performances on film) but the real star of the movie is Swedish heartthrob Lars Hanson. A real delightful performance, with real charisma.

A must-see film that deserves more recognition.

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.

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.

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.

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.