Victor Sjöström

(On Cable TV, April 2022) I did not expect to like The Wind. I’ve seen and reviewed enough silent-era melodramas to know that I don’t like the subgenre in the first place, so anything I’m going to watch faces an uphill climb for me to even say nice things about it. On paper, The Wind feels like a redundant film, as a southern belle encounters hardship upon settling in the American west – from romantic struggles to outright sexual abuse and always, always the omnipresent wind making people mad. This being said… The Wind does have two things working in its favour. The first is the atmosphere of the film, nearly taking on the feeling of a science fiction film in depicting an alien landscape where the desert is subjugated by a near-omnipresent wind kicking up dust, demolishing buildings, destroying hairdos and making life even more unbearable for everyone. The sequence in which a storm threatens a church offers a few thrills midway through, while the climax is set during a sustained gust either burying windows or revealing things hidden under the sand. (The production of the film was reportedly unbearable, with extreme temperatures and the physical pain of sand blown by aircraft propeller engines for the camera.)  Director Victor Sjöström strips everything down to very simple elements and if the pacing of the film remains silent-era-dull, there’s nothing a bit of fast-forward can’t fix. More than many other westerns, The Wind drives the point that the frontier wasn’t all pretty horses and sunsets – that its lack of niceties extracted a real toll on settlers. The other asset of the film is Lilian Gish – a gifted actress, but made more interesting here due to the film letting her hair run free. It’s meant as a visible effect of the constant wind, but it makes her look unusually modern, absent the period hairdo that usually stylizes the actresses of the time. Both of those elements combine to make the Wind far more interesting than anticipated. It’s somewhat appropriate that the film is now regarded as one of the peaks of silent-era drama – coming so late in the era that it was obsoleted by talking pictures by the time it made it in cinemas, but now stands are a remarkable achievement of 1920s filmmaking.