The fierce Mojave Desert wind beats against windows, walls and wagons; makes travel dangerous, throws you across the room when you open a door, can uncover a corpse in the sand and stands as a simple, artful metaphor for repressed sexuality. 
The wind just about drives porcelain-featured Lillian Gish crazy here. It’s one of her best roles. She’s come all the way from Virginia to the deepest, dryest South with hardly a penny to her name. Why? The film is ambiguous on that point. At first, because Gish is such a big-eyed beauty, you suspect that she’s the victim of someone’s treachery or maybe trying to escape poverty. As the film goes on though, you start to question that. The film never reveals a thing. That’s the past. This film is about her present, where men go crazy over her, other women loathe her, she kind of enjoys
the attention and not everyone ends up happy in the end. Gish’s haunting eyes are perfect silent movie mirrors for the frightening terrain, both physical and emotional. Meanwhile, the scenery is so sumptuously American that, naturally, it was directed by a Swede.