Lo sperone insanguinato

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.

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.

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.

The plot is straightforward and the milieu is entirely familiar-- open range vs. fenced farming, reformed gunslinger vs. trigger-happy kid, lots of grizzled guys and leather vests, a pointless saloon girl-- but it has enough originality and a solid enough script to transcend formula. It also has two crucial bonuses:

First, the location. There's only one long shot showing the entire Western town, but I've never seen a more decrepit or believable one- - because it's a real one. Rosita, Colorado, west of Pueblo, was well on its way to becoming a ghost town in the late 1950s (it actually is one now, in the middle of exurbs). It had only three or four wooden buildings, plus a few scattered homesteads between them and the mountains. It delivers total verisimilitude. Quite a few scenes are shot in the wilderness, too, with meadows bursting with purple wildflowers. A real Western settlement in a gorgeous wilderness-- it is iconic, far more than John Ford's Monument Valley, which is unrepresentative of any other Western landscape.

Second, the supporting cast. The faces are all more familiar than the names. Royal Dano and Irene Tedrow as squatters, Charles McGraw, Ray Teal (Bonanza's sheriff), Douglas Spencer, and as barkeeps, the wonderful Stanley Adams (Cyrano Jones, tribble salesman) and the forever-unheralded Jay Adler (Stella's brother). Adler's worth his weight in silver-- Rosita was a silver-mining settlement-- and he's in the first scene so catch that at least.

The reason that mother lode of character actors matters is because-- along with always-fine Donald Crisp and better-with-age Robert Taylor-- they carry this movie. The relative novices involved-- writer Rod Serling, actress/singer Julie London, and fish-out-of-water John Cassevetes -- handle their duties well enough. But they just can't measure up to that roster of seasoned pros, a cast that has been in so many Westerns, they feel as authentic as Rosita.

Saddle the Wind is the result of a creative conflict between golden era Hollywood and the cool method acting world of New York in the late 1950's. Both the writer, Rod Serling (of Twilight Zone fame) and John Cassavetes represented the new, "cool" world of New York. Robert Taylor, holder of the record for the longest employment by one studio) represented Hollywood with a capital "H." The director, Robert Parrish, was more on the New York wavelength.

From what I've read, Cassavetes tried to antagonize Taylor with his difficult behavior and, when he failed, got even more outrageous. The New York crew regarded Taylor as incredibly "square." The result of all this is a fascinating conflict of styles. Taylor prided himself on not "mugging" and here his reserved style worked well as Cassavetes' older brother, a retired gunman. The pain of a man watching someone he brought up as son, not a younger brother, turn into an unstable, erratic killer is evident on Taylor's craggy face. The younger brother is in constant motion--he seems to mistake activity for accomplishment.

Through a number of plot twists including disputed land ownership, romance (with Julie London) and brother-to-brother conflict, the film moves quickly and stylishly towards its inevitable end. The photography is excellent, making the best of the glorious scenery. Julie London is underused but does what she can.

In the end, New York and Hollywood work well together to make a highly watchable film. Review by me for the IMDb.