Give the cowering girl-woman a gun, and the world changes
Written: Oct 03 '00 (Updated Oct 03 '00)
Product Rating:
Pros: Images (cinematography), the last reel
Cons: it takes long time to arm Ms. Gish; and the conventions of silent films, even "naturalistic" ones can be hard for 21st-century viewers to tolerate
The original movie star, Lillian Gish, comes across as neither strong nor beautiful. It seems that she was martyred through most of her career as a silent screen star -- beaten down by Donald Crisp in “Broken Blossoms,” dangerously out on ice floes in “Way Down East,” guillotined in “Orphans of the Storm,’ ostracized in “The Scarlet Letter,” raped in “The Wind,” and so on. How peaceful she must have felt not having to do anything more than rock a cradle in “Intolerance”!
She is already cowering in the first scene of “The Wind.” She is on a train traveling west (to where is unclear to me: someplace with cattle being raised seemingly on blowing sand and with wild horses coming down from mountains; it was filmed in the Mojave desert but intertitles designate it as on the prairies). The wind is blowing sand against the window, and an unctuous salesman (Roddy Wirt) is trying to put the moves on her. She is demure to the point of prissiness.
She is met at the station by two cowhands so crude that the salesman suddenly seems more reassuring. The wind is blowing and her floppy bonnet is in constant motion on the ten-mile drive to her cousin’s. His wife (a malign, short-haired Dorothy Cumming) is immediately threatened by Letty and is determined to get this sweet and delicate presence out of the house.
There is a very hokey tornado (a giant sock?) though otherwise the blowing sand is quite real (kicked up by propellers of eight airplanes, Gish (ca. 1988) recalls in a segment at the start of the video) and enough to drive the viewer some ways on Letty’s own way to going crazy.
After learning that the salesman (who has stopped by to continue his attempted seduction) is married, Letty is forced to choose between the pair of fools who picked her up from the train. She chooses the younger one, Lige (Gish herself chose the actor, Lars Hanson, a Swedish stage actor). On the wedding night it becomes clear to him that Letty only married him because she had nowhere to go. He vows to raise the funds to send her back to olde Viginie. Getting the funds for this is what makes him go out into a squall (a northern wind) to capture wild horses. The wind itself, incidentally, is represented by a white stallion flying through the air without wings. No one said that silent film symbolism was subtle, even in what were attempts at naturalism such as “The Wind.”
Silent film acting was often very unsubtle, too. I’d have to say that Lars Anderson’s was subtle as he realizes he has married someone whose sole motivation was to keep a roof over her head. I can’t say that Gish is particularly subtle in cringing and cowering through most of the movie. No wonder she appealed to sadists!
I am not entirely sure whether she is raped and about to be raped for a second time or is about to be raped when she picks up a pistol. Finally she comes into her own. What D. W. Griffith had not realized and what Charles Laughton realized a quarter of a century later (when he directed Gish in the terrifying “Night of the Hunter”) was that the demure Gish was after all not made to be a victim. She was made to pack a gun and use it when necessary. Get a gun in her hand and it looks completely natural. (I’m sorry if it sounds like I have been seized by NRA mania,channeling Chuckie Heston, but there is something so right about an armed Lillian Gish! For one thing, you know she is going to use it if there is no alternative to protect herself or the children in "Night of the Hunter.")
She not only shoots her assailant, but drags him out and buries him in the never-ending sandstorm. The original plan was for Letty to rush out into the sandstorm and disappear. Gish recalls that the conventional Hollywood wisdom that one unhappy ending could kill a career. She was not concerned, having logged eight or nine unhappy endings already. I am often suspicious of happy endings forced on films, but this is one time that it seems right to me. First, I think she treated Lige badly and that his magnanimity should be rewarded. Second, the most striking scenes in the film for me are Gish shooting Wirt, his corpse being uncovered by the wind, and Gish’s mane of hair blowing in the last scene when she tells Lige she wants to stay and be a real wife.
Until the wedding, the characters are cartoonish. The music on the video is also overwrought. The black-and-white (mostly black!) cinematography is very striking, right in there with Murnau as moving picture art. The oppressive blowing sand is palpable. Credit Swedish director Victor Sjöstrom (who also directed Gish in “The Scarlet Letter” and would turn in a memorable performance himself in Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” three decades later) for discovering how to transform Lillian Gish from being the eternal victim. Here is the root of the determined old woman holding off Robert Mitchum’s psychopathic preacher in “Night of the Hunter” which is one of the most enduring film images in my brain.
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