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So much average

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Probably the one factor about "Saddle the Wind" that may attract modern day viewers is the fact that it was scripted by Rod Serling. But since Serling wrote the screenplay from a story by another writer, there isn't much of anything that makes this particular western different from most other westerns of this period. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad western. The filmed in Colorado backdrop is very pretty and easy on the eye, the acting (particularly by John Cassavetes) is professional and convincing, and while there isn't a terrible amount of action, the movie remains all the way through fairly compelling and not boring. On the other hand, the movie has some signs of production woes, particularly in the way of a significant number of shots being accomplished by (very unconvincing) rear projection. Also, the character played by Julie London has no real bearing on the story or other characters at all; it would take almost no effort to write this character out completely. And while the movie is not boring, it does move kind of slow at times, especially with the fact that you'll probably be a few steps ahead of the unfolding story at any point. As I said in my summary line, the movie ends up being an average western. If you like westerns, you'll probably find this reasonably enjoyable despite its weaknesses. Though at the same time, it's unexceptional, which probably explains why it took a long time to be released on home video.

This is worth a watch if you are a fan of the more adult-themed westerns of the 1950s. But whose bright idea was it to put Cassavetes in a movie like this? It's a helluva weird choice. His acting style is so different from that of his co-star Robert Taylor that the film barely holds together.To his credit, Cassavetes shoots for veracity, for a naturalism that brings humanity to a character that could've easily become a cardboard cutout of a psycho. In some ways, he is elevating the worn out clichés of the script, bringing some real life to them. But other aspects of his performance are flat absurd. For example, he periodically attempts some sort of ridiculous "western" accent, then just as quickly he'll drop it; sometimes this happens within a single line of dialog. You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy, and I never bought for an instant that he was a tough western ranch kid with lingering Confederate sympathies. And his mood swings, as he goes rapidly from giggling to brooding, are hyper and overdone.Meanwhile, Taylor is all classic Hollywood "strong & silent type" understatement, bordering on wooden and inexpressive. Their scenes together are oil and water. It brought me out of the story, into awareness that I was watching two actors who shouldn't be sharing the stage together. Their aesthetics are just too different.In the plus column, supporting character actor Royal Dano is amazing in this movie, utterly convincing as a squatter with lingering Civil War resentments and a legal claim on a piece of land that puts him in direct conflict with the area ranchers. There are some brutal, squirm-inducing, standout scenes where Cassavetes terrorizes Dano. These are really subversive in a way, as Cassavetes' character takes on a role usually reserved for Indians, nameless "Others" who are utterly inhuman and dispensable.I was also pleasantly surprised at Julie London's performance. She has a few key scenes early in the film and does a fine job, but she's underutilized; her character is sketched quickly, then left underdeveloped as her story thread is largely dropped.Overall, this could've been a lot better, but it holds some interest for those with a particular love for the sub-genre. And Cassavetes fans will find much to like about his performance, at least for curiosity's sake.

The casting in this film is mighty strange. The idea of John Cassavetes and Robert Taylor playing brothers just didn't seem right. Part of this was their styles of acting, part of it was because they looked nothing like each other and was they the difference in their ages was 18 years--old enough that perhaps Cassavetes would have been better cast as Taylor's son! But, as Taylor was a big-name actor, there was no way that MGM would cast the younger actor as his son.The film begins with the younger brother (Cassavetes) coming home with a woman (Julie London). They are planning on marrying and oddly Taylor doesn't do a lot to make her feel welcome. Later, when Cassavetes and London go into town, a pivotal moment arrives. A gunslinger is looking for Taylor, as years before, Taylor had been a gunman but had retired. It seemed that this gunslinger (played menacingly by Charles McGraw) is looking for a fight--and Cassavetes is more than willing to oblige. When Cassavetes manages to beat the guy to the draw, it was a fluke...but now there was a HUGE change in him. Now Cassavetes was a strutting and obnoxious moron--intent on proving to everyone that he is now a big man! And, in the process, London has come to realize that he's not the man she'd hoped to marry.A bit later, some squatters begin farming on land that everyone was assumed was going to stay open range. Taylor tries to get them to leave with no success. However, when Cassavetes and his no-good friend later come upon these same folks, because they were now drunk on alcohol and power, they bully these people and might have killed them had it not been for Taylor's return. In the process, it seems that the bond between brothers is broken--as Cassavetes is too ill-tempered and obnoxious to take Taylor's intervention as anything other than a grave insult. The pip-squeak little brother was not about to just accept this and the viewer KNOWS that a much more deadly showdown is brewing.While many elements of the film are quite familiar (and reminiscent of such films as "Night Passage") and the casting was very strange, this was still a good and successful western. Most of it was because the script was well-written despite its clichés (in the west, there really were very, very few gunslingers, for example) and the acting very nice. Not a great film but one worth your time.

In the 1950s, the best way to attack an intolerably conformist society was to take a harmless 'popular' genre and subvert it, overturn its assumptions. Sirk did it with the woman's picture, Minnelli with the musical, Hitchcock with the thriller; Robert Parrish does it here with the Western, with a vision of Eisenhower family-values capitalist America as a medieval feudality, where everyone must pay obeisance to a landowner, where the stable family unit consists of a killer and a wild sexual neurotic, and where capitalism is actually destructive to the family and continuity, a sterile thing.Whether John Cassavetes is an embodiment of the Western hero gone wrong, the pressure of capitalism turned in on itself, or a rebel without a cause, the film is full of powerful incident - Cassavetes' first insane shooting spree, which he ends by shooting his own puddled reflection; the drunken attack by Cassavetes and friend on a family of homesteaders, uncomfortably reversing the old attacking-Indians routine; the Leonesque showdown between Cassavetes and Ellison backed by his own brother. Very much a post-'Searchers' Western, land here is synonymous with spilt blood not destiny.