The Wind and its controversial "happy" ending

[phil noir]

If you haven't seen The Wind, and plan to, please don't read this post - I want to talk about its famously controversial ending. I wouldn't want to spoil your experience of it.

Taking it as read that The Wind is a tremendous film, one of the most powerful, best acted & directed, etc. I've ever seen (plus the Thames Silents version has one of Carl Davis's best scores, I think), I wanted to talk about its ending. I've haven't read the original novel, but according to Lillian Gish in The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, it concludes with Letty disappearing into the storm, never to be seen again. Lillian Gish, Frances Marion, Victor Seastrom et al all wanted this ending in the film. Instead we have a "happy" ending, which is always described as disappointing, ludicrous and so on.

However, I was actually struck by how ambiguous and open to interpretation this "happy" ending is. We see Letty (Lillian Gish) shoot Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), the man who has forced himself on her sexually while her husband, Lige (Lars Hansen) was away. We even see Gish completing his burial in the swirling sand. But when Hansen returns, there is no trace of Love, and given the strength of the storm, it is more than likely that his body would have been in plain view. Hansen says something about the wind always protecting those who commit a crime in good conscience; Gish says she no longer wants to go home to Virginia, and is no longer afraid of the wind, and wants to stay with Hansen and face it together.

Ambiguities: I don't believe Gish's character could have moved Love's body.
I don't believe she could have buried him in that wind.
When he turns up, she is teetering on the edge of madness; we really only have her subjective view that he was there at all.
Even if he was, and she dragged and buried his dead body, why doesn't the wind uncover it?

My reading of this happy ending is that Love was never there, that Gish has gone over the edge of madness, and that her willingness to face the wind (and the future) with Hansen is not a rational decision; it is a product of her madness.

Finally - after Gish has shot and disposed of Love, and before Hansen returns, we see Love's hat on the table. After Hansen returns we don't see the table shot in such a way again that the hat, if it were actually there, would be visible. Another glimpse of the hat would have been a tantalizing clue as to the director's intentions in this scene!

[charliechaplinfan]

Well I could read that due to the complete terror that Wirt Roddy's reappearence causes her she might get some superhuman strength from somewhere to be able to move him and bury him.

Would he still be showing when Lige returns, from the way it is photographed, I'd think so. We could believe in what Lige tells her, that the wind covers up for good people but it's just too 'Hollywood' for me.

I'm inclined to think like you, Letty finally goes mad and has an apparition and is comforted by Lige. What will she do when Wirt Roddy is discovered safe and well? Who knows.

The proposed ending does fit better but it's a bit relentless with no light relief, a bit too much. This ending for me is better because there is room for the story to move either way depending on how the viewer wants to interpret it.

[stuart.uk]

I think it was right for The Wind to end the way it did, rather than the original ending.

Lillian Gish who didn't like the end said, Letty should have died, a death for a death. However, I think modern day audiences would prefer to see Letty survive her ordeal, as rape now is rightly regarded as a horriffic crime, whereas, in a bygone age, perhaps it wasn't.

Letty's husband discribed her killing of her attacker as frontier justice. I don't have a problem with that. For example is it any different from John Wayne, setting himself up as judge and jury to avenge the murder of his best friend in The Big Trail. James Arness as mountain man Zeb in How The West Was Won, also worked on the principle of frontier justice, only in his case he had to change his ways with the coming of civilization to the west

[MichiganJ]

Just to, perhaps, muddy the waters a bit on the ending.

According to Gish biographer Charles Affron, there never was an unhappy ending shot for The Wind. In all of the early drafts of Frances Marion's script, the film ends with the reconciliation of Letty and Lege. There was a re-shoot of the ending, which merely altered the "happy ending" fade out to not include Lege's sidekick, Sourdough.

Marion had later claimed that she had written an ending based on Scarborough's novel, in which Letty, finally succumbing to the wind, runs out of the cabin and perishes amongst the blowing tumbleweeds, but, again according to Affron, there are no such passages in any of the drafts of Marion's script.

At the beginning of the laserdisc (and I assume the VHS and TCM airings), Gish herself claims that the original ending was shot and nixed by the distributors.

While I think the ending is rushed, making it a little unsatisfying, I suppose, it still works. And Gish never looked better than when nestled in Hanson's arms, the (now tamed) wind, blowing through her long hair.

While I accept the ending as is, I think the bigger and more interesting question is whether Wirt Roddy actully raped Letty at all. Since the "wind" is most definitely a metaphor for Letty's repressed sexual impulses, I doubt Roddy was even there.

[charliechaplinfan]

I doubt whether Wirt Roddy was there, it might just have been her fear and imagination, I don't see it as her supressed sexual urges until she realises there is nothing to fear. The ambiguity is there though and that's what I like, did she, didn't she kill Wirt Roddy but the result is that she overcomes her fear and the ending looks rosy. I think her being swallowed by the wind would be hard to take.

[phil noir]

I'm not sure I can accept that the wind has anything to do with repressed sexual desires (the wind being sexual desire, and Letty's attempts to resist its force being her repressive defences, I would guess). One of the reasons why this doesn't fit for me is that Gish's character is surprisingly sexual in this film; not at all the shrinking Griffith heroine she might have played at an earlier stage of her career. She is quite happy to flirt with Wirt Roddy on the train in the opening sequences, and her relationship with her cousin, despite her protestations to his wife that they are like brother and sister, has definite sexual overtones. (Letty knows, I think, that her actions make his wife unhappy, but she is bored and frustrated, and she doesn't care too much.)

What might be seen as sexual repression in her relationship with Lige, is more specific, I think. She is not sexually attracted to him (she has been compelled to marry him, after all). There are however two other men to whom she is sexually attracted in the film.

So - in my opinion, anyway - it is not sexual repression in a generalized sense, but a sexual distaste for one particular man. (And how convincingly she overcomes this in her relationship with Lige is a debatable point, of course.)

[MichiganJ]

I see Letty as a woman who doesn't understand her sexuality. She knows how to flirt with Wirt, but doesn't understand when she's flirting with her cousin, a relationship which certainly does have sexual overtones. It's quite understandable, when witnessed from Cora's perspective, why Cora wants Letty gone (that, and Letty is good with the kids)

Letty's sexual magnetism is shown again when she has three men proposing to her. But her ignorance is such that she doesn't believe them (or, in the case of Wirt, doesn't recognize that he's a cad.) She certainly revels in all of their attention, but doesn't know exactly what it means.

I also think that Letty is attracted to Lige. The embarrassed kissing scene rivals that of the chewing gum scene in The Big Parade, and becomes tender and funny. Even when the clumsy Lige violently kisses Letty and she pushes him away, there is a palpable attraction and Letty is simply horrified at the idea of having to consummate her marriage. It's the sex she's afraid of, not Lige. It's when she really starts to feel something for Lige that she falls apart.

As for the wind itself, the very first sequence on the train, when Letty smiles at seeing Wirt's attention, a blast of wind and sand hits her from her open window. The wind continues throughout, but gets worse as Letty's sexual repression becomes more pronounced. Sjöström also frequently superimposes powerful images of a bucking bronco when presenting the wind from Letty's perspective, which, to me at least, personifies Letty's sexual desire.

[phil noir]

Hm, that's interesting. Yes, it's certainly possible to see Letty as a woman who doesn't understand her sexuality. She can go so far and then her repressive mechanism kicks in.

Overall though, I prefer the idea of the wind being too big, too wild, too ungovernable to be contained within a symbolic reading.

[Your mention of Cora reminds me of that wonderful bit when she is disembowelling the carcase of a cow and, jealously watching Letty winning over her children, she wipes the bloodied knife across the front of her dress (i.e.: over her heart).]