Silent movies - The Wind

I don't know if you ever look at the sources at the end of my movie posts. If you do, you may have noticed that I often list Fritzi Kramer's blog "Movies Silently". I like how she writes, so if she has a review for a movie I'm watching, I'll read it.
She also has a ranking of silent movies on her blog, so for today I went straight to her five star films and picked "The Wind" from 1928.
I did not read her review before watching the film and making up my own opinion, all I knew was that she loves "The Wind". Let's see if I do, too.
It's rather fitting that it's windy outside right now and my flimsy little shades are rattling. It's nothing compared to "The Wind", though.

Public domain via
Wikimedia Commons

As usual, I'll start with the plot (spoilers ahead!).

Letty Mason travels from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly and his family on their farm. Even on the train she already notices the wind blowing constantly.
She catches the eye of fellow passenger Wirt Roddy who starts a conversation and tells her the wind makes people crazy, especially women.

At the train station, Letty is picked up not by her cousin, but his neighbors Lige Hightower and Mr. Sourdough. Letty is so shocked by that and the heavy wind that she runs back to Wirt who assures her he will look in on her every, now and then.
On the way, Lige tells her about the wind, especially the "norther" which the Native Americans think is a ghost horse in the clouds and which is so bad that it makes the wild horses run down from the mountains - an image that will be haunting Letty from now on.

While Beverly is most pleased to see and welcome the cousin he has grown up with like a sibling, his jealous wife Cora is not that happy about the newcomer. When they all eat together, you can tell that Lige and Sourdough have been immediately smitten with the beautiful Letty who seems very out of place.
At a fest, both Lige and Sourdough tell Cora they plan to propose to Letty. Cora is delighted at the thought of having her out of the house.
Then Wirt also drops in, and when a cyclone interrupts the fest, they have to take shelter in the basement where he asks Letty to go away with him.

Lige and Sourdough propose to Letty who thinks they are joking and laughs at them. Cora is disappointed and demands Letty leave her house, so she goes to see Wirt who tells her he already has a wife, but wants to take her for a mistress. She goes back to Cora saying she has nowhere to go and no money, so Cora tells her she will have to marry Lige or Sourdough then.
Letty marries Lige who's over the moon thinking she loves him, but gets quickly disappointed with her reaction to his kiss.

When he tries to kiss her more vehemently, she fights him and tells him that he made her hate him although she didn't want to hate him.
Shocked over this turn, Lige says he will never touch her again and promises to make enough money to send her back to Virginia.
That's easier said than done because times are hard, cattle is dying, and the ranchers have to come up with a solution so they won't starve. When Lige wants to go to the meeting, Letty, who is more and more driven mad by the constant wind, asks him to take her with him, so she doesn't have to be alone.
When she can't control her horse in the wind and also falls from Lige's horse despite clinging on to him, Lige tells Sourdough to take her home.
When the cattlemen return from the meeting where they have decided to round up the wild horses running from the "norther" for money from the goverment, they bring an injured man with them - it is Wirt. Obviously, Letty is not happy to have him in the house.
After Wirt has recovered, Lige insists that he take part in the round-up, but he sneaks back to Letty right away who, already driven crazy by the wind, faints. Wirt takes her to the bed.
The next morning, he tries to persuade Letty to go with him, but she refuses. When he says that Lige will kill them both, she coldly replies that she hopes he will. Wirt gets pushy and Letty threatens him with his own gun that he has left on the table. He doesn't take her seriously and grabs the gun which goes off and kills him.
Not knowing what else to do, Letty buries him outside.
The wind gets stronger and stronger and Letty is out of her mind.

 
She sees the wind uncovering Wirt's body.
When someone tries to open the door she has secured with a shovel, she breaks down, but it is Lige who has come back which makes her so happy she kisses him.
Then she confesses the killing. Lige looks outside, but can't see a body, so he tells her if someone is killed in justice, the wind takes care of them.
He also tells Letty that he has enough money now to send her back to Virginia, but to his joy Letty declares that she's not afraid of the wind anymore and that she loves him and wants to stay with him.

This was my first silent film with Lillian Gish, the "First Lady of the Silent Screen" - and her last one (her career went on for a long time after that, not that successful, though).
I had heard of her, but hadn't known what to expect. 

The movie had no dialog, but sound effects (remember "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" which also had those?). Unfortunately, I didn't get to hear those or the score by Carl Davis that was recommended because I couldn't find it. The score I had was improvised music and screeching and I had to turn it off because I couldn't stand it. The ensemble may have "embraced the unknowable and the uncomfortable", but watching Letty go crazy was uncomfortable enough for me without the screeching, thank you very much.
As you know, the music often makes or breaks a silent movie for me, and having to watch this one completely silently was a bit difficult, but also made me concentrate on the acting more. 

I know people who have a serious problem with wind, they get nervous and irritated by it.
While winds have been become more frequent and stronger here, we are talking nothing like the constant blowing in the movie, so I can easily imagine Letty being haunted by that feeling its force and hearing it all the time. As someone who can go crazy over bits of litter all over the place, I also understand very well if someone is driven nuts by sand being everywhere. Just looking at it made me nervous.

Letty is a sweet and dainty young woman forced into an environment where she, as already mentioned, seems utterly out of place. To be honest, I doubt she has thought very much about what it would be like, she tells Wirt about her cousin's "beautiful farm" - which it definitely isn't.
So she clings on to the only person that seems civilized to her, Wirt, and then he's the one betraying her trust which also makes her stronger in the end, though.
Gish goes through a whole lot of emotions in that movie and expresses them with eyes, hands and her whole body.

Then there is Cora on the other side, a woman working hard for her family. It's no wonder she doesn't want a pretty little thing in the house around whom the men and her family flutter like moths around a light and who gets blisters from ironing on her delicate hands while Cora has to gut a whole steer at the same time (not my scene, I can tell you).
Maybe Cora wouldn't be so jealous if Letty tried a little more to fit in.

Lige and Sourdough are so smitten from the first moment they meet Letty that they don't give it any thought that Letty might not take them seriously. Lige in particular is like a puppy with a new ball - Sourdough seems more like the comic relief - and the awakening after the marriage which has made him so happy doesn't go the way he hoped for is really rough. It also changes him, though, and makes him more responsible and caring.
I get why Letty doesn't fall for Lige right away, but I don't understand why she would prefer Wirt. Okay, Lige is a diamond in the rough which she has to find out first, but the way Wirt is creeping up on her on the train, ew. Also I'm superficial enough to say that Lige was some goodlooking man.

There are theories about Wirt's body being real or not. Did he even come back or was all of it a hallucination of Letty's? Why couldn't Lige see the body?
I haven't read the book (yet), but from what I read the rape is very real in it - and the ending is different, too.
Gish herself had come up with the idea for the adaptation, she also picked the director Victor Sjoström (also known as Seastrom in the USA) and the actor Lars Hansen (Lige) both of whom she had worked with on another film before.
According to her, it was planned to use the ending of the book as she and Sjoström wanted. In the book, Letty waits for Lige to come home after she killed Wirt. When he doesn't come, she goes to die in the desert. The claim is that MGM thought a happy ending would work better with the audience after all.
Several people, however, say that the tragic ending was never filmed.
Besides my loving a happy ending, I think it actually works rather well. Having Letty go into the desert would have been dramatic and probably have satisfied the need of some people to see some kind of punishment for the killing, but I liked the idea of Letty and Lige having grown and getting a new start.

Will this become my favorite silent movie ever?
I don't think so (all that wind and sand), but it's definitely a movie I would recommend for watching.


Selected sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: The Wind (1928) - A Silent Review. On: Movies Silently, February 3, 2013
2. Fritzi Kramer: Silent Movie Myth: "The Wind" had a happy ending slapped on and is too ... windy. On: Movies Silently, April 29, 2014
3. Benjamin Schrom: The Wind. Essay. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival. 2009
4. Adrian Danks: Open to the Elements: Surveying the Terrain of Victor Sjoström's The Wind. On: Senses of Cinema. May 2006