Lillian Gish: Gone with The Wind (1928)

As the silent era drew to a close, Lillian Gish — one of the day's greatest film stars (second only to Mary Pickford in my book) — was in need of a hit to re-establish her relevance at time when the movie-going public had flipped out for flappers and jazz singers, flying aces and all-American heroes.

Gish had starred in a string of hits for D.W. Griffith a decade earlier but by 1928, she, like her fellow stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and John Gilbert, had hit the commercial skids.

With contractual control over choice of material, screenplay, co-stars and director, and a $400,000 salary to play around with, Gish opted to make The Wind, a complex psychological drama about a frontier woman whose repressed desires slowly drive her insane, leading to death and tragedy.

Scripted by Frances Marion and directed by a pioneer of the Swedish film industry, Victor Sjöström, The Wind was a critical success — and a box-office bomb.

Gish would make just two more movies — neither a hit — before disappearing from Hollywood for a decade.

The Wind is the story of Letty (Gish) who is forced to live with her sister and brother-in-law in the forbidding environment of the frontier West. Already enduring the ever-present danger of the Texas prairie's howling wind and sandstorms, where men are killed and wild horses driven mad, the threat of an unmarried woman living in close quarters with a man proves too much for the tight-knit social order she has invaded.

Letty has a choice — enter into a loveless marriage or wander homeless in the empty prairie. Of course, she opts for marriage, but she would have done just as well choosing certain death.

Like Catherine Denueve in Roman Polanski's horror classic Repulsion, Letty's repressed desire slowly drives her insane.

In playing Letty, Gish had chosen to subvert her established screen image. For years, as D.W. Griffith's favorite actress, she had played the passive victim of any variety of men looking to relieve her of her treasured virginity. In The Wind, she finally takes up a gun and kills her would-be rapist. After all those years of playing the passive victim, the moment is liberating.

The screenplay initially envisioned a dark ending where an insane Letty wanders into a sand storm to be consumed by the desert, but when studio heads saw the initial cut, they insisted on a happy ending. The cast and crew reluctantly shot a new ending but as it turned out, it didn't much matter. Audiences rapidly acquiring a taste for talkies weren't interested in silent movies anymore or, for that matter, Lillian Gish whom they regarded as a relic of a previous age.

Silent actress turned film historian Louise Brooks also believed there was a concerted Hollywood effort to destroy Lillian Gish's reputation and box-office appeal and that a box office flop was exactly what the studio was hoping for.

It was a simple matter of economics, wrote Brooks in Lulu in Hollywood. Gish was making $400,000 a year and had complete creative control of her career. Emerging star Greta Garbo was making $16,000 and wholly dependent on the studio to solve the visa problems that would allow her to work. Brooks lays out evidence of the studio's manipulation and then posits Gish's bosses were tired of paying big money to an actress with the power to map her own career when it could pay a younger actress a lot less money to do exactly what they wanted.

Ironically, the studio eventually did to Garbo what it had done to Gish — undercut her career when cheaper actresses came along.

Gish would eventually rebound, returning to the movies during World War II, receiving an Oscar nomination for Duel in the Sun in 1946.

Her best remembered work would come in 1955's gothic noir masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter, where she played a shotgun-toting granny squaring off against Robert Mitchum's homicidal con man preacher.

"She might look fragile," said screenwriter Frances Marion, "but physically and spiritually she was as fragile as a steel rod. Nobody could sway her from her self-appointed course. With a Botticelli face, she had the mind of a good Queen Bess, dictating her carefully thought-out policies and ruling justly, if firmly."

In 1971, Gish received an honorary Oscar in recognition of her "superlative artistry and ... distinguished contribution to the progress of motion pictures." She worked steadily into her nineties and passed away in 1993, just shy of her one hundredth birthday.