At the twilight of the silent era, after playing leading roles in big-budget adaptations of established classics such as The Scarlet Letter and La Bohème, Lillian Gish prevailed upon M-G-M to let her make a film of The Wind, a contemporary supernatural novel by Dorothy Scarborough. The story of a Virginia socialite (Gish) visiting her cousin’s ranch in Texas and slowly being unraveled by the constant howl of the wind received an unusually elemental screen treatment from M-G-M’s top screenwriter, Frances Marion, and Swedish director Victor Sjöström. There are romantic entanglements (Lars Hanson as the kindly Swedish cowboy Lige) and even elements of cornpone comic relief, but they all pale next to the sheer force of the wind itself. Gish described the Mojave Desert shoot as “my worst experience in film making. Sand was blown at me by eight airplane propellers and sulfur pots were also used to give the effect of a sandstorm. I was burned and in danger of having my eyes put out.” (And it wasn’t just the actors who suffered. “Film coating melted from its celluloid base,” recalled Gish. “With temperatures at 120° F, it was impossible to develop the film. Finally the technicians packed it frozen and rushed it to the Culver City laboratories to be thawed out and developed.”) Understandably skeptical that an audience would buy a ticket for a vacation to hell, M-G-M sat on the film for over a year, and eventually released it when silent pictures were rolling around like yesterday’s tumbleweeds. The Wind earned unsympathetic and downright vituperative reviews in 1928 (Variety scolded that the source material was “just naturally poison for screen purposes”), but would soon be recognized as one of the key masterworks of the silent screen, a psychologically rich and visually dynamic dispatch from a world worn to tatters.

35mm from Park Circus

Preceded by: “Cowboy Jazz” (S & E Enterprises, 1920) – 7 min – 35mm from the Library of Congress