I have seen literally thousands upon thousands of films and every day more and more that were once out of reach at last become "mine" through a mixture of good planning and just plain random luck as I stumble around this noisy world. Yet there are always those which I value more highly over others which particularly chaff at my mind that I have yet to see them. Two of my biggest out of reach films for quite some time have been King Vidor's The Crowd and the other one which I finally got to watch yesterday is Victor Sjöström's The Wind from 1928.

A pet project of Lillian Gish's due to her deep desire to work with Victor Sjöström as well as the leading Swedish actor Lars Hanson, the story involves Lillian Gish playing Letty, a sheltered woman from Virgina who moves way out to the deep desert to stay with her cousin. Letty displays an increasingly disturbing psychosis involving the omnipresent wind that envelopes the town as well as the film and soon begins to ascribe all sorts of mental terror to the metaphorical imagery that the locals have used to describe and explain the wind. These metaphors become almost literal to Letty's poor sheltered mind as increasingly she imagines the wind is hellbent on claiming her and as her mind deteriorates and her body beaten by betrayal this becomes literally and symbolically so as the hellish wind-swept sandstorm accepts her self-sacrifice and lovingly envelopes and erases her existence giving her some much longed for peace from the madness.

Well...at least in the original ending.

But that ending did not survive and thus did not happen and so I suppose I'm forced to go with my knee-jerk, mental rearrangement of assuming the wind being more of a literal representation of Letty's fear of the unknown. Not that it wasn't before, but with the happier ending it feels more pronounced. Letty's sheltered life left her unable to cope with any change and difficult for her to accept anything beyond the immediately familiar. This problem is exemplified in her simple inability to accept the love of a truly good man Lige (Lars Hanson) whom she rejects emotionally and physically even after they are married in a particularly excellent scene brilliantly acted by Lars Hanson demonstrating the exuberant joy of a newlywed quickly turned into deeply disappointed heartbreak and quietly respectful but depressed resolve. Only once she symbolically "puts down" her single hope of escape to civilization, which himself is representative of all the unnatural sleaze and corruption that a big city can contain, is Letty able to understand the natural purity of not only Lige as a man but her surroundings as merely a natural state of things in which she can defiantly exist with finally realized strength and conviction.

Though the ending was forced upon the creators and the end result was Sjöström leaving Hollywood forever, at least I felt the happier ending was worked into the film in a manner which I felt made some sense on a multitude of levels so it didn't feel too tacked on, say in the manner which things suddenly got all rosy and awesome at the end of Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road from 1933. Overall I wasn't initially completely blown away by the film, but I really enjoyed it and felt the director did a good job dialing down Gish a bit as opposed to D.W. Griffith who more often than not encourages Gish to go all out as he tends to go in for more emotion and less symbolism. But this was my first viewing and these are just quick impressions and since I taped the hell out of it they may change after a handful more viewings...or not who can say? I'm just happy to have watched it as this point and feel better for having done so.