The Wind (1928, Victor Sjöstrom) (Patreon)

89/100

Third viewing, last seen 1997. Have had no access to it since—still waiting on a DVD, much less a Blu-ray—and over the past couple of decades my memory distorted its essential nature: Yesterday afternoon, I'd have described the film as an expressionistic portrait of debilitating isolation, starring Lillian Gish as a woman who nearly goes mad when left alone in the desert with only constant gale-force winds for company. I even remembered Gish being blown around outside at the ranch for long stretches while attempting to do chores, which does not happen (although I note that some sources, including the IMDb, give The Wind's original running time as 95 minutes, whereas the only version currently available anywhere runs 78 minutes; my previous two viewings were 35mm rep prints, so I guess it's possible, though unlikely, that I've seen a longer, even windier version). Instead, wind unmistakably functions as a metaphor for sexual desire—terrifying and destructive when unwanted, liberating once accepted—with Letty almost always in the presence of a man, or of another woman who perceives her as a threat. MGM's one-sheet even visually literalizes the concept, showing Letty cowering near an open window through which both Wirt Roddy's head and the wind assail her; if you didn't know the film's title, you might mistakenly think those four wavy lines beside his face represent words he's yelling at her. Having been reminded of this dynamic, I now feel as if Letty and Lige's relationship required a bit more attention than it receives onscreen (haven't read the novel), in order to make her climactic change of heart seem less like mere gratitude for Lige's comparative respect. I don't necessarily object to a happier ending than Scarborough wrote, whether or not that was imposed by the studio. (Gish later claimed it was, evidence apparently indicates otherwise.) Kinda love the final shot, in fact. I just wish it didn't seem to arrive from out of nowhere.

As is often the case with my favorite films, however, such niceties of psychology and narrative feel largely irrelevant compared to the aspects that shred my nervous system. The Wind plays like the silent progenitor of two gemko-certified masterpieces from the mid-’60s: Woman in the Dunes (trapped in a shack with encroaching sand everywhere) and Repulsion (slow Freudian freakout involving possible hallucinations). Sjöstrom—or Seastrom, as he's billed here—starts introducing subjective elements early on, when Letty's still on the train; her view through the window, immediately after being told about rural Texas' gal-crazin' "northers" (by the man who'll later rape her, though his crime is entirely implicit), suggests a view into insanity itself, not unlike The Starry Night's frantic swirls. While there's a relatively naturalistic lull once Letty arrives at her cousin's place, even that features unsettling moments like Cora casually butchering meat while shooting death glares at Letty. And then the last 20 minutes, after Lige and his buddies head out to round up wild horses (which have previously been symbolically linked to the wind), cranks the intensity up to bone-dry-hurricane-level, with Gish giving perhaps the greatest sclera-centric performance in cinema history. It's easy to think of silent movies as just "pre-sound," as if miraculously discovering dialogue tracks that were recorded on set would facilitate something more like the films being made in the '30s and '40s. But what Gish does here simply wouldn't be possible in a different context. It's a style of acting tailored specifically to the medium's strengths at that time, and one only need look at The Night of the Hunter to see what she was capable of when working in a very different (but no less heightened) mode. In any case, watching her pummeled by an invisible adversary with discernible speed and direction, justly fearful of its lethal power until she realizes that it can be safely harnessed, makes me feel like that dude in the Maxell ad hanging onto his armchair for dear life.