FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

98 Transition and Transformation
Then came the blow – not from the Texas wind, but from the Eastern office – the
picture must have a happy ending! Naturally, we created our own storm, to no avail.
[...] I made some genteel remark like, “Oh hell, what’s the use? If that’s what they
want, we’ll write a happy ending to Romeo and Juliet!” 45
And Gish recalls in an interview: “One unhappy ending could ruin your career,
and I had already had seven! So we were forced to tack on a happy ending,
which we all felt was morally unjust.” 46 Their main argument was to defend
art, partly perhaps as they strove to claim a legitimate place as artists within a
male-dominated film industry. As Ray Tumbleson somewhat ironically puts it:
The exhibitors, the crass money men – and they generally were men – forced the
artists to compromise their standards in order to propitiate perceived mass-market
preferences; or, to put the matter another way, they refused to let the heroine suffer
death for the crime of having been raped. 47
For purely commercial reasons, they thus had to accept the change of ending,
and Lillian Gish, instead of appearing in yet another role as a virginal, Victorian
victim, as she had already done in her seven earlier films with unhappy endings,
now paves the way for a new heroine who not only survives, but is allowed
to triumph both over her fear and over physical violation, and to appear
in the end as man’s equal.
The domination of man over nature, quoted initially in the film from Scarborough’s
novel, is thus displaced throughout the film. Its imagery of male dominance
over female nature, “gradually wresting away her strange secrets, subduing
her fierce elements”, is transformed into a story of a woman conquering
nature, in the double guise of man and of the wind, of a woman who has
“come into the domain of the winds” to stay there.