my favorite movie of 1928:
Another tour de force for Lillian Gish (see my favorite movie of 1920). Not only is she in almost every scene of The Wind, but she also chose the novel the movie was based on, wrote the story outline, and hand-picked the director and leading man.
When Gish finds herself unhappily married, lonely, and stuck at home in a remote area of Texas, a furious wind becomes a metaphor for her mental health spiraling out of control:
A MoMA curator writes:
The silent film form itself was about to become extinct, and perhaps its greatest “Western” came just before the end. The quotes are necessary because … The Wind is more a psychological study that just happened to be set in the West. Yet it contains elements central to so many Westerns[:] human isolation in a vast landscape, the alienation of the woman in Western society, and the brutal indifference of nature. … The Wind is perhaps the purest expression of a rare form, a woman’s fantasy of life in the West, in a genre dominated almost exclusively by male fantasies.
Lillian Gish, who lived to be 99 (1893-1993), looked back on her extraordinary acting career, which lasted from 1912 to 1987, and said: “The Wind was definitely my most uncomfortable experience in pictures.” (She says that in the video below, which includes a mild spoiler about the ending from 2:20 to the end of the video.)
Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.
The Wind is great, but mine would be King Vidor's The Crowd. At both times epic and intimate with amazing cinematography rarely found in the cinema in 1928.
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