The Wind (1928)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The wind |
| Original title | The wind |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1928 |
| length | 95 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Victor Sjöström |
| script | Frances Marion |
| production | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| music |
William Ax (1928) Carl Davis (1983) |
| camera | John Arnold |
| cut | Conrad A. Annoying |
| occupation | |
| |
The Wind is a 1928 American drama film directed by Victor Sjöström and starring Lillian Gish . The silent film based on Dorothy Scarborough's novel was listed in the National Film Registry in 1993 as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
action
1880s: Letty Mason is a naive young woman who moves from her native Virginia to live with her cousin Beverly in rural Texas . During the train ride, she is intimidated by the wind, which constantly hits the window panes. The train passenger, host Roddy, a cattle dealer, tells Letty of the merciless wind that would constantly blow in this area. Women in particular have already become insane. At the train station, Letty is greeted by Beverly's neighbors Sourdough and Lige Hightower. Letty feels that Lige and Sourdough are rough and primitive, and she is visibly uncomfortable in the new surroundings. After the arduous journey through the wind, they arrive at Sweet Water , the remote farm owned by cousin Beverly and his wife Cora. Letty is greeted happily by the ailing Beverly, but his resolute wife Cora behaves in a dismissive manner. Hard-working, somewhat raw Cora is suspicious and suspects an affair between Beverly and Letty, who are closely related and who once grew up together like brother and sister. Cora's three children also seem to like Letty better than her own mother.
At a local festival that is occasionally ravaged by a tornado , three men are very interested in Letty: the cowboys friends Lige and Sourdough and the cattle dealer, landlord Roddy. Meanwhile, Cora becomes more and more jealous of Letty and wants to get rid of her from her house. She urges Letty to marry one of the three men. First Letty goes to the cultured appearing host Roddy, who has already confessed his love to her. But it turns out that Roddy is already married and that Letty would at most be an illegitimate mistress for him. In her need, Letty decides between the old Sourdough and Lige for the much younger Lige as husband, although she had always mocked him so far. The wedding night is not very harmonious because Letty denies him and doesn't even want to be kissed. Despite loving Letty, the bitter league promises he'll never touch her again. As soon as he got the money, he would send her back to Virginia as soon as possible. Letty finds it difficult to get used to her new home, especially as the sandy wind blows incessantly around the house.
To prevent a famine, the cattle breeders hunt cattle together, including Lige. Letty wants to ride first because she is afraid of being alone with the wind in the house. However, she cannot control her horse and must ride back. When the cowboys return from the hunt, they also bring the injured landlord Roddy with them, who is supposed to recover temporarily in League's house. Landlord makes Letty advances again, but he is now rather scared. On a particularly stormy night, Lige is on the hunt for cattle again, Letty is left alone in the house. In the heavy windstorm, she becomes more and more insane, as host Roddy had told in the opening scene of the film. When Roddy breaks into League's house uninvited, he shamelessly exploits Letty's defenselessness and approaches her. The film implies at this point that Roddy raped her. The next morning he wants to flee with Letty and makes her big promises for the future, but Letty wants to stay with Lige. When the host attacks her, she shoots him. Then Letty buries him outside the house, but the wind reveals his body to her horror.
When Lige returns from the hunt, Letty is happy to see her husband and kisses him. She confesses what she did to him. But when Lige looks outside for the host's corpse, his body can no longer be seen. He tells Letty that the wind could cover tracks if a killing was warranted. With the cattle hunt, Lige would now have enough money to send her back to Virginia. But Letty admits that she loves him now and doesn't want to leave him anymore. They are also no longer afraid of the wind.
background
The idea for the film The Wind came from Lillian Gish , who was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time. In this position she was able to choose her co-star and director, Lars Hanson and Victor Sjöström . Gish, Hanson and Sjöström had already made the drama The Scarlet Letter (1926) together two years earlier , which had been a great success. For Hanson it was the last and for Sjöström the penultimate film in Hollywood. Both Swedes withdrew to European film with the start of talkies at the end of the 1920s. The film was shot in the Mojave Desert , but the extreme heat made the work of the film crew difficult. The film rolls, for example, threatened to warp in the heat, which is why they had to be cooled with ice. The wind in the film was generated by eight huge, but at the same time very dangerous propellers.
The screenwriter Frances Marion stuck to the original book The Wind by Dorothy Scarborough from 1925, but it differs in the end: Letty goes mad when the wind reveals the body of the murdered man. She then wanders into the wind storm to die there. However, it was decided not to give the already dark material a negative ending. How this came about is controversial: A story told by Lillian Gish, among others, says that the cinema operators insisted on the comparatively happy ending late in the production of the film so that the film would be more successful at the box office. In the meantime, however, early script versions have appeared in which the happy ending - apparently without the influence of producers or cinema operators - already occurs.
Reviews
When it was released, the film received mostly positive reviews, although it lost around $ 87,000 at the box office. Today it has a rating of 100% in six out of six positive reviews on the US critic portal Rotten Tomatoes , with an extremely high rating of 9.6 / 10. In 2008, the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma listed The Wind as 42nd of the best films of all time. Since 1993, the film is also part of the National Film Registry as being particularly worthy of preservation film.
“A late work of the silent film era. The film, which is considered the best Hollywood film by the Swedish director, impresses with its successful inclusion of natural elements. "
"And in America were Sjöström's three most famous works He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928) - each was about the human suffering. The Wind is almost certainly the best - a silent film classic (...) that gave Lillian Gish one of the best roles of her career. "
"Perhaps Gish's best film vehicle - and one of the last great silent films - with a superbly crafted desert storm scene at the climax of the film (rating: four out of four stars)"
Web links
- The wind in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- abstract
Individual evidence
- ↑ IMDb Trivia
- ↑ IMDb Trivia
- ^ Scott Eyman : Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer , Robson, 2005, p. 139
- ^ "The Wind" at Rotten Tomatoes
- ↑ Cahiers du cinéma ( Memento from July 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ The wind. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 25, 2017 .
- ^ Review of "The Wind" at the Guardian
- ↑ Leonard Maltin : Turner Classic Movies Presents Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide: From the Silent Era Through 1965: Third Edition . Penguin Books, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-698-19729-9 , pp. 598 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed on May 11, 2019]).