"Twilight Zone" writer Rod Serling tried his hand at writing a western with director Robert Parrish's "Saddle the Wind," an average but unexceptional oater with Robert Taylor, John Cassavetes, and Julie London. Mind you, Serling was one of the top writers in early television, but he seems about as lost in these wide open space as a stray calf with this hard-bitten, hackneyed oater about two brothers, with Taylor as the older and Cassavetes as the young brother, clashing about just everything that comes up. Steve Sinclair (Robert Taylor of "The Law and Jake Wade") had to raise his younger, impulsive brother Tony (John Cassavetes) because they had no parents. Tony turned out no good, and Steve has had to take care of his hot-headed sibling since then. Basically, this is a juvenile delinquent on a range scenario with little to recommend it beyond Cassavetes' spirited performance.The action opens when Tony comes back to their spread, the Double S Ranch, after selling their herd at market. The surprise is that he has with him his fiancée, Joan Blake (Julie London of "Man of the West"), in a brand new buckboard. Steve explains to Joan that the Double S is no more ready for a female than Tony is a wife. Joan isn't the only thing that Tony has brought back. He has purchased a fancy six-shooter. Steve doesn't approve of Tony's 'tricked-out' revolver because the trigger has been honed "so fine you could sneeze it off." Tony feels committed to protect his older brother and starts practicing with his new revolver. Although Steve is a reformed ex-gunfighter, Tony doesn't think that Steve is fast enough to protect himself. Steve isn't impressed with Tony's fervor to protect him. Tony spends hours perfecting his draw. In one telling shot, he shoots his reflection in a pond. In the ranch house alone with Steve, Joan tells him that she was the daughter of a hide hunter and has roamed every frontier town. She met Tony in a saloon where she sang songs, and he treated her with so much respect that she found him refreshing and his description of the valley and Double S such that she decided to accompany him back to the ranch. Steve informs Joan that he has been Tony's father and mother since his kid brother was four. Steve still cannot believe that Tony wants to get married. Just as Tony returned with Joan, Steve asked his top hand why he didn't dissuade Tony from bringing the woman back with him. The ranch hand delivers the best line in his response to Steve: "Looking after your brother is like poking hot butter in a wildcat's ear."Meanwhile, a tough hand with a six-gun, Larry Venables (Charles McGraw of "The Narrow Margin"), wanders into the valley looking to kill Steve. Steve served as Deneen's trail boss for three years before he got the Double S Ranch. Dennis Deneen (Donald Crisp of "The Sea Hawk") owns the rest of the valley, but Deneen gave Steve a third of his precious valley to raise cattle. Indeed, Deneen is the law in the valley, though we never see any of his hired hands, except for his gruff foreman, Brick Larson (seasoned heavy Ray Teal of "Bonanza" as a good guy), who backs Deneen up at every turn.Tony gets lucky one day in the saloon and kills Venables. Deneen is upset because he hates violence and wants Steve to run Tony out of the valley. Meantime, things aren't going so good between Joan and Tony because she doesn't like the way that Tony kisses her. The showdown comes when a former Union officer, Clay Ellison, Owner of Strip (character actor Royal Dano of "Moby Dick") arrives with his family to farm the land left to him. Steve warns Ellison to clear out, but Tony isn't as nice. Saddle tramp Dallas Hanson (Richard Erdman of "Objective, Burma") and Tony harass Ellison and his family and set a wagon on fire before Steve and Blake arrive to calm things down. Ellison takes his claim to Deneen. Again, Deneen is dead set against violence for no reason that we are ever given. He agrees to stand by Ellison despite his lack of love for barbed wire.The following morning Deneen and Brick escort Ellison into town to buy his barbed wire. Tony is waiting with an itchy trigger finger, and he kills the shotgun wielding Ellison. Ellison's death doesn't reduce Deneen's resolution to see not only Ellison's land fenced off but also his own land fenced off. He warns the storekeeper not to sell anything to Steve. Steve decides to hang it up and give his ranch back to Deneen. Predictably, Tony is furious, rides out, and confronts Deneen. They have some brief words and Tony shoots him, but Deneen wounds Tony. Brick rides over to Steve's ranch and lets him deal with Tony. Steve and Tony pull their six-guns on each other in the high country.The end to "Saddle the Wind" is pretty depressing and there is nothing in Tony's character to explain his mysterious decision. Steve rides back, checks up on Deneen and decides to settle down with Joan at his side. The uninspired Elmer Bernstein musical score doesn't heighten the tension and the theme is rather bland. Reportedly, John Sturges of "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" performed some polish up, post-production work, but nothing would have saved this western. The performances are strong, the scenery is rugged, but the clichés are intact. "Saddle the Wind" is pretty saddle sore stuff.

As he got older Robert Taylor got cast in more and more westerns as did so many of his contemporary stars. His first western was in 1941 as Billy the Kid and had Taylor had his way, he would have done a lot more of them sooner. He lived on a ranch in his later years with his second wife Ursula Thiess and their kids and he definitely looked home on the range.He plays an older and wiser gunfighter like Gregory Peck's character of the film of the same name who would like to settle down and with the help of Donald Crisp, the big cattle ranch owner in the valley where Taylor owns his spread, he's trying to make an honest living.The problem is that Taylor has a younger brother, a wild kid played by John Cassavetes, who wants to emulate his brother or at least the older version of his brother. And he causes a great deal of problems before the end of the film.Cassavetes has an interesting part. He could have played it just like Skip Homeier did in The Gunfighter, a punk without any redeeming qualities. But he has to convey enough of a sense of decency so that we understand why Taylor just won't give up on him. I think he succeeds admirably.The most interesting best of the supporting roles belongs to Royal Dano. He's a bitter, troubled man himself. His father owned a strip of land and abandoned it 20 years ago. Dano moves back on it and tries to assert his rights. In a situation that could probably be worked out either by men of good will or an honest court, neither is available. The result is tragedy all around. I think that this was probably Dano's best screen performance.Taylor and Cassavetes offer an interesting contrast between a studio personality who learned to become a good actor and a New York based method actor. But that's not the only reason one should see Saddle the Wind. A good, but very grim western is the reason.

Robert Taylor as Steve Sinclair gets top billing in this film and John Cassavetes(Tony Sinclair) steals the picture from Robert Taylor, but the real star of the film is its chief writer, Rod Serling. Serling establishes at the beginning of the movie a town where the folk 'don't want any gun-play'. In the opening sequence, Larry Venables (Charles McGraw) comes into a bar demanding whiskey, eggs and a side of information on the whereabouts of Steve Sinclair. Though we don't know it at the time, Tony Sinclair killed Venables' brother. So now we see Venables berating the barkeep with insults and threats, throwing the watered down whiskey to the ground and letting everyone in the bar know, if he has to, he will wait for his moment of revenge in the bar. This really establishes the tone for the entire movie. Something bad is about to go down, even if that something bad means he(Venables) has to die in this bar for it to happen. The dialog in this opening scene is bright and snappy, not a word out of place.Things really start to speed up when the younger Sinclair comes into the movie with Joan Blake(Julie London)in tow. Although he remarks to his 'soon to be' wife that, 'Steve's gonna love you', I doubt very much that he knew how true that statement would be. It's too bad, really because the young Sinclair has enough young man's angst/sexual energy to burn, as he spends his first moments with his girl at the new homestead actually away from his girl, shooting his gun at objects around the ranch trying to impress his older brother. At one defining moment of self loathing in the movie, the young Sinclair duels with his own reflection in a puddle.Another intriguing character is that of Dennis Deneen(Donald Crisp). He seems to be the center of the movie; always defining a pacifist approach to the violence in his town, letting his cattle wander freely without any fences. Then later wanting to do the right thing for a Yankee squatter who was wronged by the younger Sinclair over a land claim, and finally giving the moral high ground to his surrogate son, the elder Sinclair, ultimately forgiving him when the elder Sinclair couldn't attain his same high morality. Serling establishes a character who is as adverse to gun-play as he is to putting up fences around his property. The song that Julie London sings is very good.Cassavetes, Crisp, London and Taylor give solid performances. 9/10.Clark Richards

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.