![The Wind ( 1928 ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - Spain ]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41b1amXWd-L._QL70_ML2_.jpg)
This is one of the great films of the silent era, made just as the "Talkies" were on the horizon. It is gripping and has almost no melodramatics about it, and it's a crime that it hasn't been fully restored and come out in DVD, preferably with the great score provided by Carl Davis.
It is also Lillian Gish at the height of her career, the finest and most beautiful actress to ever grace any screen. It is her most mature role, after all the adolescent roles she played for D.W. Griffith, and under the direction of Victor Sjostrom (who towards the end of his life would star in Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries) she is able to pull out all the stops without resorting to the big exaggerated gesturing of the Griffith years. She can do it all with the biggest, most expressive eyes on the screen: happiness, misery, boredom, and terror.
As a penniless orphan named Lette, she has come from the lush green hills of Virginia to live with her cousin Beverly (A male cousin named Beverly? Or am I missing something) in the desert wastelands of Sweet Water, Texas, an ironic name for a place that has virtully no water! It is also a place of torrential winds that never cease, and the heady one that is blowing when Lette arrives is just a mild summer breeze compared to what will come later. Because of the wind, dirt and sand get into everything, even in the food people eat. At one point in the film Lette is using a box full of sand to wash the dishes in! (We who live in the Southwest often get torrential winds in the late Spring and early Summer, and all we can do is tolerate it while the tourists go on enjoying themselves at calmer times. Dust and pollen seep in everywhere.)
Lette is warmly greeted by her cousin Bevery, but her cousin's wife Cora has nothing but hostility towards her. Already the incessant wind is disturbing her. She is further unnerved as a cyclone interrupts a country dance. When Bevery dies she is thrown out of the house. Alone and friendless, she marries a man more out of survival than for love. The man she marries is Lige (Swedish leading man Lars Hanson), who seems more decent than most of the others but doesn't really love her either. Their wedding night is a disaster.
So now Lette is stuck in a loveless marriage in Lige's little shack (If you look closely at the papers pinned to the walls you might notice a "New Yorker" cover) with nothing to do but sweep the endless sand off the floor. It's a well-known fact that many pioneer women went insane not just from a hostile climate but also from sheer boredom, and that is now Lette's case. When Lige is called away to round up some wild horses a Northern kicks up, and Gish now displays in her exquisite eyes the blank stare of madness as Lette can only sink deeper into herself while the house is being rocked and pummeled by hurricane-force winds and the sand just pours in. And when she shoots and tries to bury the leacherous cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love) -- and he won't stay burried because the sand keeps getting blown off his body -- the look of terror she has is not to be missed.
That was the old school of acting. Lillian never attended any such thing as the Actor's Studio or the British Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts: her genius was simply that she was a natural. And she put up with a ton of production crap without complaint. I wonder if any of today's pampered stars can go through a windstorm produced by eight airplane motors or 120 degree heat for a picture.
And now time for a SPOILER ALERT, so all those who haven't seen the picture and don't want to know the ending in advance must go somewhere else.
Many people have objected to the phony "happy ending" tacked on by the studio execs so as not to upset audiences too much. Certainly the real ending with Gish wandering off into the desert to die (which had been filmed and is still lying around somwhere to be restored) would be more logical, but let me suggest something that you can perhaps think about:
When Lige returns home and Lette seems to recover and tell him that "I'm not afraid of the wind ... I'm not afraid of anything ... I love you and I want to be your wife." ...
Maybe THAT'S the sign that she's finally gone over the edge!
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2010
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2007
Top reviews from other countries
Zaroff
Masterpiece pure and simple.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2017D Borja
Uno de los clásicos por fin en dvd subtitulado al español!!!
Reviewed in Spain on September 26, 2014Grandma Jenny
... years ago as a teenager and thought it was wonderful. I was very excited to find that it ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2014
