Sjöström's most canonized American film and one of the final masterworks of silent cinema before the sound revolution. For twenties Hollywood, it's also as grimly naturalistic as anything this side of Greed. (Stroheim shot in Death Valley, Sjöström in the Mojave Desert.) This bleak psychological Western has an innate musical structure that builds in crescendo-like intensity. Lillian Gish's Letty Mason is a refined, dispossessed virgin (from Virginia) who arrives in 1880s rural West Texas and enters an elemental hell of male predators, relentless wind, and choking sandstorms. The boundaries between nature and psyche blur as Letty descends inescapably into the abyss. In the film's original nihilistic ending, she goes mad and wanders into the desert to die, but MGM forced Sjöström to shoot a romantic happy-end substitution. Disillusioned, homesick, and wary of talkies, he contractually completed two more Hollywood films (both regrettably lost) before returning to Sweden permanently in 1930.