The Wind (1928)

Directed by Victor Sjöström

Starring Lillian Gish, Lars Hanson and Montagu Love 

Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM)

In a barren desert landscape, a train navigates the rocky terrain, buffeted on all sides by wind and sand.

Within a passenger car sits Letty, a single woman on her way from Virginia to stay with her cousin Beverly and his family on a hard-scrabble plot of land in Texas. A cattle rancher takes an interest in Letty and there are some sparks before the wind intrudes, blowing through an open window in the car.

Once at the station, Letty disembarks and is escorted to her cousin's house by the rancher Wirt Roddy and two cowboys, Lige and Sourdough (because really what else would you name cowboys?).  Her cousin is thrilled to see her and his kids take an immediate liking to her as well.  Beverly's wife?  She sees Letty as a threat and starts pushing her rival out.

After demurring at first, Letty accepts Roddy's proposal to take her away from this wind-beaten patch of wasteland and moves out of her cousin's house. Of course Roddy decides that is the moment to reveal he already has a wife. Without a home or any prospects, Letty must marry either Lige or Sourdough. She goes the younger route and she and Lige get hitched.

Lige quickly realizes Letty does not love him and promises to save money to send her away. Complicating this plan is the unrelenting wind and desert which are killing off the cattle. Can Lige take Letty away from this spirit-crushing existence?  Or will Letty finally learn to live with her lot in life?



 I have admired a number of melodramas during my marathon. If there is a thread that connects those I have enjoyed, I'd say it's that as overwrought as the emotions became, the characters were consistent and their actions came from a place I could understand (if not agree with).

I don't get any of the people that populate The Wind.

The film is a series of characters making bad decisions. I started out wondering why the hell Letty would want to move to this barren landscape. By the end, I couldn't figure out why anyone lived there.

Letty moves in with her cousin and his family. Beverly's wife clearly doesn't want the outsider there. And not in a passive-aggressive dropping the occasional hint way. More of the in-your-face, "get out of my house now!" way.  You'd think maybe that issue would have come up before Letty got on the train.

So Letty marries Lige and she seems shocked when her new husband expects her to love him. Shocked that the husband expected his wife not to be repulsed by a simple kiss.

Later, Lige heads out to the range to survey the dead cattle with some other ranchers. First off, the cattle are dead because the ranchers are trying to graze them in the middle of the $&%#*@$ desert. Second, Letty insists that she cannot stay alone at home with the wind so she rides off into the middle of this constant sandstorm with Lige. And she gets thrown from her horse. And then she rides with Lige on his horse and that horse throws her. So she has to go back home anyway.

None of this would be terrible if the characters' motivations didn't seem so arbitrary scene-to-scene.  The film careens from one moment to the next with each of the players suffering from an amnesia that makes them forget everything they previously said or did.

The completely asinine story gets better acting than it deserves from the two leads. Lillian Gish is reliably great here as the woman being driven mad by gusts of wind. And Lars Hanson manages the trick of taking Lige, a character that begins as simple comic relief, and turning him into a fully formed, sympathetic human being.

There are some fantastic choices made by director Victor Sjöström. He builds the tension after an argument between the newlywed couple by focusing the camera on the husband's and wife's feet as they pace back and forth across the cabin, until Lige decides to break the stalemate.  We then follow his shoes until they reach Letty. The film's conclusion ratchets up the suspense and features a haunting shot of a dead body being buried by the wind blown sands.

While there are some positives here, it's not enough to save The Wind. The fundamental setup is so flawed and the script has the characters make increasingly stupid decisions.

** out of *****

NOTE: The titular weather from The Wind was produced using eight airplane engines.

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Orphans of the Storm (1921)

The guillotine awaits our heroine

Directed by D.W. Griffith

Starring Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Joseph Schildkraut
Produced by D.W. Griffith Productions

In 18th century France, a family is torn apart when the husband is killed and their baby abducted.  The men leave the child on the steps of Notre Dame Cathedral, where she is found by Jean Girard.  Girard is bringing his own baby daughter to abandon.  However, upon seeing the baby lying in the snow, he returns home with both his own child Henriette and the found one Louise.  The Girards rais the girls as sisters, until the plague arrives, killing the parents and leaving Louise blind.

Henriette finds a doctor in Paris who can cure Louise, but the blind woman wants her sister's assurance that she will not leave Louise for a husband in the city.  Henriette makes the promise and the two set off for the city.  Their path crosses an aristocrat who falls for Henriette and he kidnaps her, leaving the blind Louise to fall into the clutches of the Frochards, a family of beggars who see the stricken woman as a meal ticket. 

Henriette escapes from the nobleman with the help of Chevalier de Vaudrey and the two fall in love.  Of course, the beginning of the French Revolution may destroy everyone and everything.  Can Henriette find her sister in Paris?  And will she keep her promise not marry until Louise has regained her sight?  Or will the sisters be casualties of the revolution.

Orphans of the Storm is a good period piece by D.W. Griffith featuring real life sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish.  I loved the last two-thirds of the movie.  From the moment the sisters are separated, the film sails on the acting skill of Dorothy and especially Lillian Gish.  As Lillian begs to be saved from her abducter, you feel her desperation.  You sense her internal conflict in every moment with de Vaudrey.

This is also a return to form (for the most part for Griffith).  The end sequence with Danton, a French revolutionary, racing to save Henriette from the guillotine is thrilling (though a mash-up of the climax of The Birth of a Nation and the modern story from Intolerance).  The aristocratic party and the battle scenes from the revolution are classic Griffith.  They are crisply paced, well-edited and  have a scale that you can only get from a movie.

The scale of the movie is also one of its great weaknesses.  The scope means you spend the first half hour meeting various characters and getting a lot of exposition.  Because some of the players have no interaction with the sisters until much later, it feels a bit plodding at times.  Once he sets the table however, the movie moves at a better pace.

There is one absolutlely brilliant shot that I want to highlight.  An aristocrat's carriage moves through a crowd of children who scatter.  One of the children doesn't move fast enough and is trampled by the horses and carriage.  The first time I watched it happen on screen took my breath away.  Amazing practical effects work for the time!

There are some odd choices throughout that hurt the tale.  Some of the edits are overly choppy, as though the director was watching to much MTV.  There's also a secondary character Picard who randomly turns into comic relief throughout the last third of the film, and always at the worst possible moment for comedy.  I know why Griffith is attempting to inject the laughs, but it just doesn't work.

Still, the direction and the acting are top notch and Griffith continues to pull out both surprising and effective camera moves and angles.  It's 2-1/2 hours long, so it's not going to be for everyone.  Orphans of the Storm is not as good as Intolerance, but it's closer to the Griffith I love than his last couple.

**** out of *****

Photo from The Dancing Image

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Way Down East (1920)

The amazing ice floes ending from Way Down East

Directed by D.W. Griffith
Starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess
Produced by D.W. Griffith Productions

Anna Moore lives with her mother in the country.  The poor family needs money and Anna heads off to visit her rich relatives in Boston for a loan.  The extended family is less than thrilled to see their country bumpkin niece show up.  Anna sticks around for a ball and meets Lennox Sanderson, who we are told has three specialties: "ladies, Ladies and LADIES".

Lennox proposes to Anna and all seems well.  Except Lennox tells his betrothed to keep it a secret, then pays someone to pretend to be a priest and marry them.  Off they go on their honeymoon and, after a few reluctant moments, the sham marriage is consummated. 

The marriage of course results in a pregnancy, which forces Lennox to come clean.  Anna is on her own and gives birth to a boy.  But the boy is sick and dies in short order.

Anna is now a social pariah (having a baby and no husband is a big no-no) and is evicted from her room.  She wanders into another town where she meets up with the Bartletts and finds work on their farm.  She keeps her past a secret from them, but catches the eye of the Bartletts' son David.  She resists his advances, ashamed of her past.

Soon enough Lennox ends up at the estate across the street from the Bartletts.  Will Anna's secret be revealed to her new adoptive family.  And can David love her in spite of her past?

Way Down East is the tale of two movies.  One has impressive acting by the two main leads and a climax as visually stunning and engaging as any I have seen in the silent era.  The other is pretentious, in need of editing and full of characters who appear to be in a different movie.

Let's talk about the first.  Lillian Gish is easily now my favorite actress of the silent era thus far.  She is natural in most scenes, but when the emotional moment comes, she goes for it.  And it never seems over the top.

Richard Barthelmess is someone I hope to see more of.  He is great as David, underplaying his role for much of the movie.  He is pitch perfect in his confusion when Anna's secret comes to light, then he is fantastic in his rage at Lennox when he discovers the circumstances behind Anna's pregnancy.

If a 2-1/2 hour movie can be saved by a ten minute ending sequence, this is one comes as close as any.  Anna runs from the Bartletts' home into a winter storm, ultimately collapsing near an icy stream bank.  The ice breaks away from the shore and large chunks of the ice start flowing down river.  David chases her onto the river, jumping from ice chunk to ice chunk to reach Anna before the ice floes go over the waterfall.  It's a thrilling chase, masterfully edited and perfectly acted.

Unfortunately, the film has a lot of problems as well.  Griffith has developed this annoying habit with his language.  It's flowery as though written by someone who wishes he were a poet, but doesn't have the skill.  A sample:

Time and place - in the story world of make-believe
Characters - nowhere - yet everywhere
Incidents - never occurred - yet always happening

Beyond the language, his film style conveys a sense of over-the-top imagery that is out of place.  At one point, a bird lands on Gish's shoulder, demonstrative of her goodness and harmony with nature.  It's unnecessary.  The audience is already on her side. 

A lot of the secondary characters are completely unnecessary.  The Bartletts are surrounded by townsfolk who attempt to serve as comic relief.  Unfortunately, it's hard to make the audience laugh at the inept constable when you've just killed off our heroine's baby. 

Finally, there is one moment in its sheer lunacy I need to point out.  The Bartlett patriarch, Squire, is told secondhand that Anna had birthed a child out of wedlock.  He is angry, but his wife says he needs proof.  So the next morning he gets up bright and early and rides a sleigh to Anna's former town.  He arrives at noon.  He walks into her old room and ask the landlady if it's true.  She confirms it in two sentences.  He then goes back out, gets in his sleigh and drives back.  The guy just went ten hours round trip to have a 90 second conversation.  And that is proof.  It's completely unnecessary in the story.  He could have just acted on the initial claim and you could have had the same result.

You could have cut this movie by almost half and had a lot of the same impact.  A lot of the opening 45 minutes is plodding and unnecessary.  There's a lot of melodramatic filler throughout the movie that could have been lost and I would not have missed it.

It's hard to say whether this is good movie or bad movie.  There are moments I loved and moments that were painful to sit through.  I guess I'd give it a middle of the road:

**1/2 out of *****

Watched on Netflix Watch Instantly

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Broken Blossoms (1919)

Barthelmess with the amazing Lillian Gish

Directed by D.W. Griffith
Starring Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp
Produced by United Artists

Cheng Huan leaves his native China on a mission to sow the tenets of Buddhism among those in England.  However, he soon finds himself as a shopkeeper in the Limehouse district of London, spending his days smoking opium.  His only joy comes from seeing the young Lucy pass by his store.  Despite her ragged clothes, Cheng sees her inner beauty and admires from afar.

Lucy lives a difficult life herself.  She is the daughter of a prize fighter, Battlin' Burrows, who thinks nothing of taking out his aggressions on the girl.  So miserable is Lucy that she literally must grab the corners of her mouth to force a smile.

After one particularly violent attack by her father, Lucy wanders from her home and collapses in Cheng's doorway.  The former missionary takes the girl in and cares for her.  Though clearly smitten, he never takes advantage.  Can the two find love?  And what will happen when Battlin' Burrows learns his daughter is with a foreigner?


Broken Blossoms seems like almost an experiment in movie-making from D.W. Griffith.  Can he take the techniques he used to tell the massive, epic stories in Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation to not only tell a much more intimate tale, but to make that story feel just as epic?

On this count, the movie almost entirely succeeds and even surpasses his earlier work.  The final act of the film is assembled into a dizzying array of close-ups, medium and long shots that feel very modern in their editing.  Toward the end, Griffith intercuts between Battlin's boxing match and a tender moment between Lucy and Cheng. The impact gives Lucy's scene even more tension as the action in both the ring and Cheng's apartment build.

The three main leads are fantastic. Gish brings a melancholy to the performance that no other actress could have matched.  In the end, as she tries to hide from her father, her terror becomes crazed beyond anything I have seen before.  You believe she is in fear for her life.  Barthelmess brings a dignity and nobility to his role and Crisp is menacing as the brutish antagonist.

None of that is to say the film is perfect.  There are moments that become tedious, particularly in the second act as Cheng cares for Lucy.  Although we are told she was with Cheng for only one night, the events of the film made it seem to stretch longer than that.

The other major flaw from a modern perspective is the treatment of the "yellow man" in the film.  While it's easier to look past the derogatory references to the minority characters as indicative of the times, having a white actor play Cheng was distracting.  In order to look Chinese, Barthelmess walks through the film with his eyes half-closed and his eyebrows pointing up.  He never struck me as Asian as much as he did sleepy.

Unlike the problems of racism in The Birth of a Nation, which structured its story as an argument for racism, the treatment of the Chinese is a minor quibble in what is an otherwise great film.  Definitely recommend.

****1/2 out of *****

Watched on Netflix Watch Instantly (also available at the Internet Archive)
Photo from Another Nickel in the Machine

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Intolerance (1916)

This was a set.  Seriously.

Directed by D.W. Griffith
Starring Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, F.A. Turner
Produced by Triangle Film Corporation

Intolerance is Griffith's follow-up to his hugely successful (but incredibly racist) epic Birth of a Nation.  Intolerance weaves a narrative from four different stories throughout history: modern day America, ancient Babylon, 18th century France and the time of Christ. The connecting thread of the tales is the impact intolerant people can have on the good and the just, literally upending entire civilizations.

Let's start with the great.  Babylon is one of the most impressive sets I have seen.  Ever.  The scale and scope of the city, populated by hundreds of extras, is massive and Griffith brings the camera back to show you the scale.  The story is engaging with enough plot and characters to fill an entire film.  An unladylike young girl is saved from a forced marriage by the prince of the city.  She returns the favor by fighting for him when the armies of Cyrus attempt to breach the city walls. The battle is gorgeous and includes massive siege towers and a flame-throwing cart that had to have resulted in many injuries amongst the extras.

The marvel of these scenes is their scale.  Griffith appreciated the massive canvas film could provide and built sets that were 100 feet tall.  He was among the first to mount his camera on a crane and, during a feast scene, slowly brings the camera from atop the city down to the steps where revelers are dancing.  During every moment in Babylon you get this tremendous sense of the scope of the place which makes the ending more unfathomable.

However, the most enthralling tale in the movie is the modern day story.  A mill owner, in order to finance his sister's charity, cuts the wages of his workers who then strike.  There is a street fight between the mill owner's men and the workers that ends with the death of the boy's father and the displacement of the workers to find a new life in the city. 

The boy falls into a life of crime, but changes his ways when he meets and marries "the dear one."  However, the boy cannot so easily leave his past behind and is framed for murder.  The story ultimately leads to a thrilling chase as the dear one races a train to convince the Governor to spare her husband.

Griffith again proves his mastery of the medium during this final action sequence.  He gets his camera into places no one else is even thinking about at the time.  The way he tracks the car as it chases down the locomotive while cutting back to the husband's walk to the gallows creates a palpable tension.

Unfortunately, the other two stories do not fare as well.  The French tale feels like its walking the same ground as the other stories with less spectacle and action.  And Jesus only appears to punctuate the mood in other stories.  For example, as the boy is facing the executioner, we cut to Jesus carrying his cross.  Griffith is not interested in giving us a telling of the New Testament; he's interested in Jesus as an exclamation point on his other stories.

You see this dozens of times.  Just this.

The worst aspect of the film is a fifth story Griffith sprinkles throughout and that is the image of his most famous actress Lillian Gish as a mother slowly rocking a cradle.  It is a moment of innocence before intolerance infects the human condition.  It is also pretension injected into what could have been one of the greatest movies ever.  And Griffith constantly returns to this image between and in the middle of scenes.  We get it.  Please move on.

For Griffith, Intolerance was a commercial failure.  In his attempt to attack the critics of Birth of a Nation, he produced a film I feel surpassed his earlier work in every way.  It's a shame the public at the time did not reward the artistic achievement the movie represents.

At over three hours, it is hard to recommend people sit through this one.  I would love to watch the Babylon and modern day stories on their own as I think these would hold up very well even today.

Watched on Netflix Watch Instantly
Photos from (what is this?) and 1001 movies you must see before you die

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The Mothering Heart (1913)

A crazed Lillian Gish

Here's another D.W. Griffith film (this one clocking in at just over 23 minutes).  Lillian Gish plays a young woman who, against her better judgment, agrees to marry her boyfriend. After struggling to make ends meet, the man finally gains some success and takes his wife to a nightclub.  She is out of place in high society, but he manages to attract the attentions of another "idle woman."  The husband soon begins an affair with this woman and when his now pregnant wife finds out, she leaves him for her mother's house.  Ultimately, the wife begins raising the child on her own and the husband's concubine attracts the attentions of another man.  Seeing the error of his ways, the husband tries to reconcile.  But is it already too late for their marriage and... the baby?

All right, I'll admit it. This one felt like a chore. The story was just never terribly engaging. The entire relationship between the unnamed husband and wife just never really clicked, so his philandering does not come as a shock.

A couple of real positives are on display here, first and foremost being Gish's performance. This is the first performance I have seen in this marathon that is off-kilter.  I'm talking Gary Oldman in The Professional off-kilter.  Nicolas Cage in... well, everything, off-kilter.  When the wife discovers the other woman's scarf in her husband's coat pocket, she smiles, frowns, laughs and becomes angry over the course of seconds.  At the end of the film as she wanders through her rose garden, she looked (to me) exactly like Michelle Pfeiffer's crazed Selina Kyle in Batman Returns.

The most remarkable thing to share however is the ending. SPOILERS FOLLOW!  A title card appears on the screen saying "The baby ill."  That statement is like describing the great flood from the Bible as a slight drizzle.  The doctor comes to the house, dotes over the child for a minute and the baby dies.  The woman loses it and the husband, who had just seen his child presumably for the first time moments ago, mourns by the cradle. After destroying the rose bushes she so carefully tended during the movie, the wife reenters the house and is about to kick her husband out when she notices the baby's pacifier juxtaposed against his wedding ring.  As the movie ends they appear to reconcile in that moment.

Because of the inherent shortness of the piece, nothing about this ending feels earned.  The baby is on-screen for mere moments before you find out the baby died.  The husband is generally a jerk throughout and there is no evidence he's changed at all.  The wife has spent entire movie being put upon, has her baby taken from her and is rewarded with the moron that she spent the movie escaping from.

Technically, the movie feels both overly long (with repeated shots of the goings-on at the nightclub) and compressed (I could not for the life of me explain passage of time in this movie).  He does more referencing of earlier scenes than I've seen before, most notably when the husband first attracts the idle woman's attention and then later has the situation very precisely reversed in both action and staging. 

I love my Griffith, but beyond Gish's kooky performance which is great, this is one of the lesser works I've seen from the director.

Watched on YouTube
Picture from MoMA

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The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)

Here's another by legendary filmmaker D.W. Griffith.  The Musketeers of Pig Alley is the earliest example of a gangster film and features Lillian Gish in one of her first screen roles.  The film follows a musician and his fiancee as they struggle in New York City.  The musician leaves in order to make some money.  While he is away, the young woman meets the Snapper Kid, head of a gang in the slum.  The musician returns a richer man, only to have his wallet taken by the Snapper Kid.  After the death of the girl's mother, a friend takes her to a ball with the gangsters.  The girl is almost drugged by a rival gangster when the Snapper Kid intervenes.  The argument over the girl erupts into a battle in Pig Alley.  Will the Snapper Kid survive and elude the cops?  Can the musician get his money back?

Of the films I've watched so far, this is easily the most violent.  The gun battle is quick, but gives you a sense of the brutality of it despite the lack of sound.  Griffith continues to prove his mastery of both shooting and editing film. There's one shot in particular where the Snapper Kid walks into a full close-up of his face which provides a great sense of mood.  The film creates a great atmosphere with the Snapper Kid's cigarette smoke wafting into the frame in certain scenes before you even know he is there.

Some more movie tropes are on display.  Obviously, the Snapper Kid is about as stereotypically a gangster as you could expect. He cocks his hat in his first appearance and the hat stays exactly in place for the remainder of the movie.  This is essentially every gangster you've seen in the first half of the 1900s, including James Cagney.  Although her appearance is brief, the woman's friend who shows up to take her mind off her mother's death exists in just about every romantic comedy of the last 30 years.  And of course, the musician to demonstrate his lack of cash, reaches into his pocket and pulls it completely out.

I liked this film, though not as much as Griffith's previous work.  There was a lot going on over the course of 17 minutes, but I thought the pace really slowed leading up to the gun battle.  The short shoot-out was well done and the ending has some great pantomime by the actors, particularly the gangster, that made me laugh out loud.

Watched on YouTube
Image from Some Came Running

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