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"Seems like we been over this before." This line from
Comanche Station evokes not only an unspoken mutual history the two primary antagonists share, but also the fact that director Budd Boetticher and screenwriter Burt Kennedy's "Ranown cycle" of classic Westerns represents both the distillation of the Western genre and a droll running commentary upon it. In the six remarkable journey Westerns running from
Seven Men from Now in 1956 through this 1960 gem, Randolph Scott is always the hero, a man of few words bearing a legacy of almost unendurable pain and loss. There is always a villain whom strength of character and the rules of the genre game demand that Scott eventually engage in mortal combat--despite the fact that the rascal has a lot of charm, intelligence, and sometimes even scruples to recommend him. There may or may not be Indians, but there will always be a menace lurking in the unrelievedly barren landscape through which the characters make their way, united only by expediency and constantly engaged in discussing the ethical quandary of knowing they're going to try to kill each other sooner or later.
Comanche Station is the purest of the Ranown films (though Seven Men from Now and The Tall T remain the most exciting). Scott plays Jefferson Cody, a loner dedicated to riding the wasteland to ransom women captured by Indians--hoping against hope to recover his own wife, lost these many years. This time the rescued lady (Nancy Gates) has a reward on her, which genial bad man/good fellow Ben Lane (Claude Akins) would like to claim. And thereby hangs a wonderfully wry and tensile tale, expertly told by the reigning absurdist of the Old West. (It's worth noting that Comanche Station obviously was a big influence on Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country two years later, though Peckinpah denied it.) --Richard T. Jameson
