The Wind (1928)

Film: The Wind (1928)
Stars: Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson, Montagu Love, Dorothy Cumming, Edward Earle
Director: Victor Sjostrom
Oscar History: Early on with the Oscars, they were quite reluctant to nominate silent films past the first ceremony, and so it wasn't nominated despite it being considered a landmark film today.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

One of the great tragedies of The Jazz Singer coming along when it did was that the Silent Era arguably hit its creative peak around 1927-28.  While there had been classics made before, some of the movies we think of as the best films of the Silent Era (The Crowd, Sunrise, The Passion of Joan of Arc) all were released at the very end of the period, becoming relics but also examples of lost promise-an indication that we might have been in for more sweeping stories during the period.  One of the best examples of this, that I had not seen until Criterion called my cards (by taking it off their platform & making me finally get to the movie) is The Wind, the last major silent film released by MGM, and generally considered to be one of the studio's best.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a poor woman named Letty (Gish), who moves from Virginia to live with her cousin Beverly (Earle) on his ranch in Sweetwater.  While she's going there, she meets a sneaky man named Wirt Roddy (Love), who flirts with her on the train and tells her about how the winds in Texas make women crazy.  When she gets there, Beverly is delighted to see her, but his wife Cora (Cumming) is jealous of their relationship and how Letty is more beloved by her children than Cora is, and she throws her out of the house in a rage.  She then is forced to marry one of her local suitors, and after she finds out Wirt is married, she goes for a sweet-but-simple neighbor, Lige (Hanson), who learns on their wedding night that she doesn't have any desire for him.  As the film progresses, the winds drive Letty more mad, and during one particular wind storm, where she resists Wirt but after she passes out he rapes her (this isn't said explicitly, but it's heavily implied), she kills him when he says they must run away together (insinuating that he thinks it was consensual).  She does kill him, and buries him, and then confesses what happened to Lige when he returns.  Magically the winds have disappeared the body (Lige says that they do this when a death was justified), and Letty realizes that she has loved him the whole time, falling into his arms & no longer fearing the winds.

The plot kind of sounds silly (cause it is a little silly), but it doesn't feel that way in the film.  The Wind is really good, and its best aspects are showing the cruelty of men when it comes to their attitudes toward women.  Letty goes through hell in this film, enduring indifference, cruelty, and ultimately sexual violence, and the film doesn't shy away from that, and neither does Gish's performance.  This is the sort of film that just a few years later would have surely been flagged by the Hays Code for its frank (for the 1920's) take on sexuality.  However, the performances, particularly Gish and Cumming (the sort of supporting role that Oscar might have noticed had the category existed at the 2nd Oscars), are astounding.  This is the best silent work that I've seen from Gish, and maybe her best work period, give-or-take Night of the Hunter.

The other thing I want to call out here is the score.  The film exists in multiple different prints, and I am going to insist if you're seeing this for the first time that you catch the one scored by Carl Davis (this appears to be the one most often shown on TCM).  The score is unreal-it's one of the best scores, possibly the best score, I've ever seen attributed to a silent movie, and it's so effective in the film.  It really captures the passion of the winds, the terror of them, and adds an element to Gish's performance that probably wasn't there initially, but is a sign of a great composer who can see a way to add an element to the movie that is beneficial.  I don't normally get in for a conversation of "you have to see the X cut of a movie" as I think films should stand on their own merits regardless of the cut (and if they can't, that cut shouldn't be available to the film-going public), but I'm making an exception here.