The Wind

Evidently, the original ending was tragic. The ending we have now is happy.

Of course, that all depends on your point of view.

We have the incomparable Lillian Gish coming to a place that must be roughly in the center of hell; desert, no water to be seen, and with a constant windstorm that often kicks into overdrive and does its best to blow the little settlement off the map (no loss, in my opinion).

Not surprisingly, Gish's character, Letty, can't handle the wind. Every time it starts up, her face turns fearful and fearsome; you just wait for her to break. It isn't just the wind, though. There is absolutely nothing of beauty anywhere in the landscape. The people are hard-working and, by the look of them, filled with despair. Some genius has decided to raise cattle in this No Man's Land (with what water? What grass?) and the local men are desperate to keep the operation going.

Rather than throwing in the towel and moving on, they continue to try eking out a living in this area. Letty finds herself stranded in the settlement, penniless, with her friend's ragingly jealous wife having thrown her out of their house. What the friend thinks of this, isn't recorded.

Letty, desperate, marries one of two men who proposed to her on the same night; not surprisingly, she chooses the one who is younger and more attractive, Lige (played by Lars Hanson). A fascinating scene follows, in which Lige takes Letty to his cabin and tries to bed her. When she rebuffs him, you see more of the person he really is. The realization that she has married him for convenience, not love, shatters him and he promises to earn the money to send her away as soon as he can.

The "happy" ending comes after Lige returns from an attempt to capture a band of wild horses to sell to the government, as a way of earning the money to send Letty home. In the meantime, Letty has been raped by another man, who took advantage of a raging windstorm to assault her in the knowledge that Lige could not return for several hours. Letty, in turn, has shot and killed the man, and buried him outside, or rather, let the wind bury him by covering him with the ever-present sand.

At the end, Letty tells Lige that she is in love with him, and that she can stand anything as long as they're together.

Wait. She no longer fears the wind, which almost drove her to a breakdown? She doesn't mind living in the middle of a barren, ugly landscape? She doesn't mind the constant sand drifts? She doesn't mind the very real threat that the whole cabin might blow away, with them in it? She doesn't mind that they'll die poor?

Furthermore, didn't he corral any of the horses, as he set out to do? If he did, he has some money, maybe even enough for both of them to leave the area and find a more hospitable location to live.

I don't see this as a happy ending. Deluded, certainly, but not happy.