THE WIND

(1928, Victor Sjöström) Shy Virginian Lillian Gish travels West, where she’s taunted by a jealous woman, wooed by an insentient field hand, victimized by a lecherous rogue and tormented by the demonic tempest that relentlessly besieges her tiny cabin. Sjöström’s American masterpiece reaches the expressive heights of silent drama. Print courtesy Library of Congress.

REVIEWS

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"One of the masterpieces of the silent cinema and Sjöström's best American film... Exteriors were shot in the blistering hot Mojave Desert, and so penetrating is the atmosphere that one can almost feel the wind oneself and taste the endless dust."
– Georges Sadoul

"One of cinema's great masterpieces... Sjöström directs with immaculate attention to psychological detail, while making perfectly credible the film's transition from low-key, naturalistic comedy of manners to full-blown hysterical melodrama. Filmed under extremely difficult conditions on location in the Mojave desert, its climactic sandstorm sequence has to be seen to be believed, although the entire film – erotic, beautiful, astonishing – demonstrates such imagination and assurance that it remains, sixty years after it was made, completely modern."
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)

"A silent masterpiece. Sjöström finds a perfect image for Gish's frustration and discontent in the prairie wind of the title. His strange and effective style might be best described as pastoral expressionism."
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader