Sometimes psychedelic, often fever pitch, always gorgeously directed melodrama from the last wave of the American silent film era. A great ghost horse rides across the plains and the men crowd in, backs hunched against the wind, all eyes on Lillian Gish...
Marriage is being stuck without options in a dim, tight cabin with a man who is pacing like a tiger in a cage, hungry and wanting, while the wind outside drives across the land, pressing against the walls of the cabin, stress testing the world, splashing prairie sand like waves against fragile window panes.
Both Lillian Gish and Victor Sjöström hated the dog shit ending which totally subverts the ending of Dorothy Scarborough's bleak proto-feminist novel and undoes…