Editing The Wind (1928 film) (section)

===Retrospective assessment===
''The Wind'' has gained significant prestige retroactively.

The British newspaper, ''[[The Guardian]],'' in 1999 reviewed the work of director Victor Sjöström and they wrote,

{{Blockquote  | And in America his three most famous works—''[[He Who Gets Slapped (film)|He Who Gets Slapped]]'' (1924), ''[[The Scarlet Letter (1926 film)|The Scarlet Letter]]'' (1926) and ''The Wind'' (1928)—each dealt with human suffering. ''The Wind'' is almost certainly the best—a silent classic, revived in recent years by producer/director [[Kevin Brownlow]] with a [[Carl Davis]] score, which gave the great Lillian Gish one of the finest parts of her career...Sjostrom treats the inevitable clash between Letty and her new surroundings with considerable realism and detail, allowing Gish as much leeway as possible to develop her performance. The entire film was shot in the [[Mojave Desert]] under conditions of great hardship and difficulty and this was probably the first 'Western' that tried for truth as well as dramatic poetry. One of its masterstrokes, which looks far less self-conscious than any description of it may seem, is the moment
when Letty hallucinates in terror at the sight of the partially buried body of her attacker.<ref>[http://film.guardian.co.uk/Century_Of_Films/Story/0,4135,65594,00.html ''The Guardian'']. "Victor Sjostrom: The Wind,"  July 15, 1999. Last accessed: February 20, 2008.</ref>}}

In a retrospective of silent films, the [[Museum of Modern Art]] screened ''The Wind'' and included a review of the film in their program.  They wrote, "What makes ''The Wind'' such an eloquent coda to its dying medium is Seastrom's and Gish's distillation of their art forms to the simplest, most elemental form: there are no frills. Seastrom was always at his best as a visual poet of natural forces impinging on human drama; in his films, natural forces convey drama and control human destiny. Gish, superficially fragile and innocent, could plumb the depths of her steely soul and find the will to prevail. The genius of both Seastrom and Gish comes to a climactic confluence in ''The Wind.'' Gish is Everywoman, subject to the most basic male brutality and yet freshly open to the possibility of romance. As a result, the film offers a quintessential cinematic moment of the rarest and most transcendentally pure art."<ref>[http://www.moma.org/collection/printable_view.php?object_id=89498 Museum of Modern Art]. MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 174. Last accessed: February 20, 2008.</ref>

Biographer Lewis Jacobs compares ''The Wind'' favorably to Austrian-American filmmaker [[Erich von Stroheim]]’s 1924 masterpiece ''[[Greed (1924 film)|Greed]]'':
{{blockquote  | ''The Wind'' becomes the physical expression of the emotional struggle of the characters…the outstanding quality of the film was its documentary realism, which had much in common with Greed. Like Greed it penetrated into psychology of the characters by means of an objective treatment of their environment.<ref>Jacobs, 1967 p. 367</ref>}}

Jacobs adds that Seastrom, in his treatment of American [[Midwestern United States|Midwesterners]] was “as uncompromising as von Stroheim in depicting it.”<ref>Jacobs, 1967 p. 367-368</ref>