However, I believe the latter variations of their formula provide diminishing returns.Ĭomanche Station steals blatantly from the previous films: another dead wife backstory, an abandoned outpost, the bounty hunter buddies, and competition between two men over a bounty. Some even enjoy Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station more than its ancestors. The director? Sam Peckinpah.Like Howard Hawks did with Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo, Budd Boetticher and Burt Kennedy recycled elements of The Tall T and Seven Men From Now over and over again. The film was 1962’s RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. It was another Western, by a new young director, delineating the contrast between the Old West and the New. Boetticher directed one other film, 1969’s A TIME FOR DYING ( Audie Murphy’s swan song), wrote the story for TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA, and made an appearance in the 1988 film TEQUILA SUNRISE before his death in 2008.Īs for Randolph Scott, after a thirty-plus year career in films, the actor had one more film in him before settling into a comfortable retirement at the age of 64. It was finally released in 1972 to no great acclaim. Boetticher went from here to direct the gangster drama THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND and some TV work (ZANE GREY THEATER, DEATH VALLEY DAYS, THE RIFLEMAN), but spent much of the decade working on a documentary about Mexican bullfighting legend Carlos Arruza, an obsession which consumed him and created much hardship for the director. There is some truly majestic camerawork here by Boetticher and his DP Charles Lawton Jr., the outdoor scenery becoming a character itself, filled with both beauty and terror. Lane, and the small cast also features Skip Homeier and Richard Rust as Lane’s accomplices. Nancy Gates (SUDDENLY ) does good work here as Mrs. Claude Akins as Lane is a smiling menace with an evil laugh who has ideas of his own about what to do with Mrs. He’s the eternal Wandering Cowboy, cursed by fate to search for his love, a search that has so far been in vain. His singlemindedness of purpose has led him to a life of bartering for the release of captive white women in hopes of finding her. Scott is stoic as Cody, a man whose wife was captured by Comanches ten years earlier, and has been searching for her ever since. There’s plenty of action, danger, and drama along the way, as the renegades aren’t the only threat, and a surprise twist at the end. Lowe must ride to Lordsburg on their own, with those scalphunters close behind. The station manager returns, an arrow in his chest, telling Cody and company the stagecoach was turned back by renegade scalphunters before he dies, and now the four men and Mrs. Lowe’s husband is offering a five thousand dollar reward for her return – dead or alive. The two were formerly in the Army together, where then-Major Cody busted Lane out of the service for the slaughter of a village of friendly Indians. We learn one of these men is Ben Lane, a bounty hunter who shares a dark past with Cody. Lowe encounter three men being chased by the tribe. Stopping at Comanche Station, Cody and Mrs. He bargains with hostile Comanches for a captive white woman named Nancy Lowe, wife of a wealthy rancher. The loneliness of the Westerner is again a key theme as the film begins with the solitary figure of Scott as Jefferson Cody, riding across that rocky, barren, now mighty familiar Lone Pine terrain. COMANCHE STATION was the final entry in the Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher/Burt Kennedy series of Westerns, and in many ways a fitting ending.
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