Libre comme le vent

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.

This movie will keep your interest in an unexpected way. Probably due to the work of Rod Serling's screenplay. It is well casted and well acted and well directed. John Cassavetes performs magnificently in his role but unfortunately his role is highly annoying. I would have reduced his adolescent behavior and given him a bit more gravity which would have Improved the picture immensely. Rod Taylor and the others played their parts extremely well which always makes a movie enjoyable. The scenery was grand and the music very pleasant and fitting. Excellent work and strongly recommended.

The Sinclairs and the Deneens are two ranching families who share the open range in their remote western valley. Steve Sinclair is a fine, strong man who has put his gunslinging days behind him and is now a figure of rectitude and stability in the affairs of the valley. His younger brother Tony, however, is a hothead who is beginning to regard himself as a handy guy with a six-gun.

Robert Taylor plays Steve with manly, tight-lipped stoicism, contrasting markedly with John Cassavetes' Tony, a jumpy dynamo of attention-seeking energy. This thoughtful MGM western sets up a whole web of conflicts and tensions: there is the inevitable clash between the two brothers, the uneasy modus vivendi with Old Man Deneen, friction between ranchers and homesteaders, as the latter try to settle on the free range. When Tony returns from a trip to the city bringing with him the beautiful Joan (Julie London) as his bride-to-be, yet another source of conflict arises.

"Steve's gonna like you," Tony tells his new fiancee with unconscious irony, not knowing that it is Steve and Joan who will fall for each other. The romantic closeness between the saloon girl and the older man is never made explicit, but it is plain that they are destined to be a couple. The psychology of this tentative relationship is sensitively portrayed, for instance in the scene where Joan remarks, "I've seen reformed gunmen before." Steve reacts with a mixture of shame and hurt which tells us that he desires her good opinion.

Prefiguration is a stylistic leitmotif running through the film. Larry Venables refuses to have his saloon table cleared, and then later Tony prevents Manuelo from clearing another table. Deneen's young son was killed in a futile gunfight, an event which has impacted on the life of the whole valley, and we see the tragedy re-enacted as other men lose their lives needlessly. Tony and Dallas act out a playful 'mock' draw on the exact spot where Ellason is later gunned down.

A good deal of the film's psychological import is conveyed, not in dialogue, but through visual communication. Joan's reaction when Venables makes trouble in the saloon suggests that she knows the bad guy but is trying to conceal the fact. After the shooting, we see Tony fail the 'test', though nothing is ever said directly. Joan wants to be taken home, and Tony's immature decision to stay drinking with the boys signals the breaking-point of the relationship. Joan moves away from the group and sits alone. The ploughshare which is used for shooting practice symbolises the threat posed to wholesome farming life by irresponsible gunmen. Tony places his arm on Steve's shoulder, and Steve dislodges it with the subtlest of movements, showing the rift that is growing between the brothers, but which neither wishes to acknowledge. In the very next image, Hank tries to take the whiskey bottle away from Tony, but Tony clings to it, his pattern of destructive self-indulgence now well established. Once Deneen (the marvellous Donald Crisp) has decided to choke the range with wire fences, we see bales of barbed wire thrown down onto the ground with force. They glint harshly, their steely newness a hostile presence, harming the soil. When the brothers finally meet, we see each of them silently preparing his gun.

The scene in which Steve and Joan ride back from town is nicely done, with its change of tempo from hard anger to a quieter, more reflective mood. Steve shows himself to be a man of complex emotions beneath his stern facade.

The film is shot in Cinemascope and MGM's own colour process, Metrocolor. In the first scene, Venables menaces the bartenders in the saloon, a drab brown man in a drab brown setting. This is this creature's element. A very striking effect is achieved as the scene changes and we see the open range, the beautiful sunlit countryside contrasting powerfully with what has gone before. By the end of the film, the sage is in bloom, and the image of the young man dying on a brilliant purple carpet of natural luxuriance is almost unbearably poignant.

Elmer Bernstein was the Musical Director, and in his characteristically understated style he did his usual excellent job. By 1958 it was beginning to be ambarrassing for audiences to see a character breaking into song, but the restrained guitar accompaniment as Julie London croons the theme tune salvages this one from seeming too obtrusive.

Everybody is looking for his place in the world. Deneen dreams of establishing a paradise where violence is unknown, and Steve is striving to be a good rancher and to live down his past. Tony wants to make a name for himself, while Joan is hoping to escape the squalor of her earlier years. Venables wants the kudos of having killed Steve Sinclair, and Ellason is yearning for the homestead of his dreams. Some achieve their persoanl nirvana, but most don't. The film's message is that violence and confrontation don't move anybody forward in life.

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.

"Saddle the Wind" is the first of two 1958 Westerns in which Taylor plays a reformed outlaw... He is cast opposite a promising newcomer John Cassavetes... The sexy and flamboyant Julie London provides the love interest but her role is poorly defined and almost working from outside the plot...

Robert Taylor is a personality on screen rather than an actor... He plays here an ex-gunfighter who has reformed and is living and working on his ranch peacefully... But fate will not allow him to retire... Cassavetes, his wild young unstable brother shows up carrying a six-gun, and with a sexy dance-hall singer London...

Cassavetes' intensity did add excitement to the show... He shoots down a tough character and with his killer instinct now waked up, he attacks a group of homesteaders led by Royal Dano and sets fire to their belongings... This battle has much more cinematic electricity than the final confrontation between the two brothers...

Strong landowner (Donald Crisp) imposes himself at this point, and asks the two brothers, now troublemakers, to leave the country...

Shortly after that time, Cassavetes gets into a wild and confused struggle with Crisp's men and is wounded, but manages to escape... Taylor goes out to get him...

With some magnificent Colorado Rockies scenery caught effectively by George Folsey's CinemaScope and Technicolor photography, "Saddle the Wind" is modestly effective, humorless Western drama...