The Wind
About The Wind
Letty Mason comes from Virginia to her cousin Beverly's ranch at Sweetwater, Texas, where the wind does not stop and his wife Cora forces her out. Cattle buyer Wirt Roddy wants her as a mistress, and he already has a wife, so she marries the neighbor Lige Hightower for a roof and then cannot bear his touch. In a later storm Wirt returns, his revolver goes off in the struggle, and she buries him. The wind uncovers the body. The hands on the cabin door are Lige's, and she tells him she will stay.
Cast & crew
More about The Wind
Lillian Gish brought Dorothy Scarborough's 1925 novel to Irving Thalberg, asked for Victor Sjöström to direct, and wanted Lars Hanson opposite her. Frances Marion adapted the book. MGM finished shooting by the summer of 1927, held the picture until November 23, 1928, sent it out with a Movietone score and effects, and recorded an $87,000 loss.
Themes
Making
In the novel, Letty goes mad when the wind uncovers the corpse and walks into the storm to die. Gish said that ending was replaced on orders from the studio's Eastern office. Louis B. Mayer's biographer says no sad ending survives in script or footage. The release print is the ending Gish and Sjöström did not want.
Reviews
Mordaunt Hall, in the New York Times, preferred the rain outside the theater, called the wind on screen a sham, and wrote that Sjöström "hammers home his points until one longs for just a suggestion of subtlety."
Look
John Arnold shot the sand and the wind near Bakersfield and in the Mojave Desert.
Music
William Axt is credited with the music. The 1928 release carried a synchronized Movietone score and sound effects, and no spoken dialogue.
Preservation
Prints circulate. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
Notes
- Montagu Love plays Wirt Roddy. Dorothy Cumming plays Cora. Edward Earle and William Orlamond are also billed.
- Conrad A. Nervig edited.
- It is the last silent film starring Gish, and one of the last pictures Sjöström directed in America.
- The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
Scenes
- Lige and Sourdough flip a coin over which of them will propose. Letty thinks it is a joke.
- A cyclone stops the party. In the basement Wirt says he will take her away.
- Letty buries Wirt outside the cabin, and the wind starts to uncover him.
- She takes the hands at the door for the dead man. They belong to Lige.
Influenced by
- The Wind, the 1925 novel by Dorothy Scarborough
Also available
- Internet Archive (the-wind_1928)
- Wikimedia Commons (The Wind (1928) by Victor Sjöström.webm)
