The Wind

Victor Sjöström's last great American film, starring Lillian Gish in what may be the finest performance of the entire silent era. Letty, a gentle Virginian, travels to the desolate plains of West Texas to live with her cousin's family, where she is relentlessly battered by a howling, sand-laden wind that seems to embody every hostile force closing in on her — isolation, unwanted male attention, a loveless marriage, and her own unraveling psyche. The climactic sequence, with a real Texas sandstorm raging outside and Letty's sanity fraying inside, is one of silent cinema's most viscerally intense achievements. MGM tried to impose a happy ending; the original cut was even more devastating. A masterpiece of psychological horror disguised as a frontier drama, and Gish's performance is simply beyond praise.