An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was included in the list ‘They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?’, I thought I might as well check it out. I have to admit that I’m not yet really familiar with Victor Sjöström’s work but I certainly loved ‘He Who Gets Slapped’ and even more ‘Körkarlen’ so I had some rather high expectations for this one as well since it seemed to have also a strong reputation. Well, to be honest, I wasn’t really impressed after all. I mean, some of the shots were pretty neat, especially this white horse going wild in the sky and all these scenes with this mighty wind blowing so hard were pretty neat (it must have been hell to shoot the damned thing though). Unfortunately, as far as I was concerned, the story was just too slight though. Basically, it was about some boring young woman who was rejected by her jealous sister-in-law and who then ended up being harassed by 3 worthless guys but none of this was really entertaining or interesting to behold. Sure, I get that I shouldn’t take the whole thing so literally and that Sjöström was going for some kind of allegory/metaphor about the wind but I just didn’t connect with what the hell he was going for (I’m probably too dumb for such surreal movies). The fact that none of the characters involved was really intriguing didn’t help either. Concerning the actors involved, Lilian Gish was already a legend back then and I have to admit that she was really charismatic, even if her character was the typical defenseless young girl that you got to see in countless melodramas from the time period. She apparently picked up Lars Hanson but, even though Larson was not bad at first when Lige was pretty much a goof, his character changed way too much through the duration so, at some point, I had no idea what I should think about his character after all. Anyway, to conclude, even though it didn’t really work for me, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

6/10