Classic Rewind: Saddle the Wind (1958)

Aside from some dazzling CinemaScope photography and a lovely Julie London title song, Robert Parrish's Saddle the Wind ('58) is a modest, insubstantial western that, at just 84 minutes, feels a tad slight and undernourished. 
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A classic good brother, bad brother family saga, Robert Taylor plays Steve Sinclair, an ex-gunman who has settled down in the valley owned by rancher Dennis Deneen (Donald Crisp) with his careless, hothead younger brother, Tony (John Cassavetes) who brings home a spiritually wounded saloon girl (Julie London) named Joan. 
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When a past enemy, Larry Venables (the great Charles McGraw) comes to town, it sets Tony down a path of violent recklessness that tears he and Steve apart, not to mention his fine catch, the fetching Joan Blake. 
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Tony's decent into madness and hysteria should have been tragic and compelling, but Cassavetes, who would become a renowned independent director and a formidable actor in films like Rosemary's Baby, overplays it here, turning Tony into a runaway freight train who can't be stopped until he runs off a cliff, and not a minute too soon. 
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Taylor, meanwhile, has always been an actor who works better playing a character with a hot streak in him (Johnny Eager), but he runs ice cold here in his usual "straight" role, a la All the Brothers Were Valiant ('53), another tale of feuding siblings. Like that film, Saddle the Wind is compellingly shot and yet inadequately meager. [C+]