‘Silent Movie Week 2024’
Museum of Modern Art
July 31-August 6

As part of its annual Silent Movie Week, the Museum of Modern Art will be presenting seven recently restored films that include notable stars like Louise Brooks and Clara Bow and esteemed directors like Howard Hawks and Frank Borzage. The centerpiece of this year’s edition — or, at least, the opener — is Victor Sjöström’s “The Wind ” (1928). The plan is for the picture to be screened in the museum’s sculpture garden. Should be fun.

Or maybe not. “The Wind” is a story of displacement, ostracization, rape, and insanity. Adapted by Frances Marion from her own novel, the picture was Lilian Gish’s baby from the get-go. An MGM wunderkind, Irving Thalberg, green-lighted the film at Gish’s request. Given her clout as a movie star — Vanity Fair famously dubbed Gish “the First Lady of the Cinema” — she insisted on having Lars Hanson as leading man and the Swedish-born Sjöström as director. 

Gish had worked with Sjöström two years before on “The Scarlet Letter” — by common consensus, the best film adaptation of the Hawthorne book — and felt that she had benefited from “the Swedish school of acting … repression.” Contemporary viewers might balk at the notion that Gish’s performance here is wholly repressed. Actorly mannerisms typical for the time account for a degree of overstatement, and the camera does unduly linger on Gish when she’s at her most plaintive.

Did Gish insist on this kind of attention or did Sjöström feel she deserved it? Cinematographer John Arnold, working with the make-up crew, accentuates the naivete of Gish’s character, imbuing “Letty Mason” with a wan, virginal light. Lest I be accused of slamming Gish’s “superlative artistry,” let me note that her performance is touched by moments of grace. The extended scene in which Letty confronts her husband Lige Hightower (Hanson) on their wedding night is almost unbearably tense. The admixture of trepidation and eroticism is all Gish’s doing, and it is no small thing.

Gish’s performance improves as the storyline progresses, taking the route from by-the-book melodrama to something considerably darker. We first meet Letty on the train: She’s leaving behind an impoverished life in Virginia to live, presumably under happier circumstances, with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). While traveling, she is espied and then courted by Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love). Notwithstanding his gentlemanly demeanor, we can intuit the truth about Wirt: He’s a cad and a rake.

The thing about this part of Texas? The wind is corruscating and persistent, a force that will, Wirt tells Letty, drive a woman mad. Upon her arrival in faraway Sweetwater, Texas, Letty is met by Lige and Sourdough (William Orlamond), two cowpokes who shepherd her to the family homestead. There, she is greeted by Beverly and his three children. Wife Cora (Dorothy Cumming) is less amenable to the winsome and pretty Easterner in her midst. All the while the wind blows and blows….

Letty marries Lige out of desperation and convenience, but Wirt can’t be stopped: He’s still out to win Letty’s favor. When Letty finds herself alone with Wirt during an especially ferocious storm, circumstances turn ugly and drastic measures are taken. As a result, Letty becomes increasingly manic and experiences hallucinations that may not, in the end, be all that hallucinatory. Throughout the picture, Sjöström applies a distinctly European sense of portent to the proceedings: A ghostly symbolism abides.

The bigshots at MGM strong-armed Gish and Sjöström into providing a happy ending. Truth be told, the revamped ending is decidedly equivocal: It’s high-strung and manic in emotional tenor. Love wins out, I suppose, but not in a way that promises sustenance, balance, or calm. In the end, “The Wind” is a symbolist’s reliquary, a Western for those who prefer their moralism writ harsh.