Comanche Station (1960)

Director:

Budd Boetticher

Writer:

Burt Kennedy (written by)

Release Date:

March 1960 (USA)

Genre:

Western

Tagline:

SHE WAS WORTH $5000 ALIVE...OR DEAD! (original print ad - all caps)

Plot:

A man saves a woman who had been kidnapped by Comanches, then struggles to get both of them home alive.

Plot Keywords:

Reward | Rescue | Horse Thief | Search For Spouse | Loss Of Friend

Cast

Randolph Scott	...	Jefferson Cody
Nancy Gates	...	Nancy Lowe
Claude Akins	...	Ben Lane
Skip Homeier	...	Frank
Richard Rust	...	Dobie
Rand Brooks	...	Station Man
Dyke Johnson	...	John Lowe

Runtime:

74 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound Recording)

Certification:

UK:PG | West Germany:12 | Finland:K-16 | USA:Approved (certificate #19427)

Filming Locations:

Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California, USA

Company:

Ranown Pictures Corp.

Trivia:

After making this film, the last of the so called Ranown Westerns (those that were produced by Randolph and his partner Harry Joe Brown) Randolph Scott felt the time was right to retire. Two years later, he was talked out of retirement by a young Sam Peckinpah, to make _Ride The High Country (1962)_, after which he would retire for good.

Quotes:

Frank: You want to go to work, do you?
Dobie: Work?
Frank: Making an honest living?
Dobie: Oh, no, I don't think I could do that. I could cowboy some.
Frank: Well, what will that get you? You work yourself to death for somebody and likely they will have to take up a collection to bury you.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Budd Boetticher: An American Original (2005) (V)

The cinematic equivalent of a modernist painting.

The Western takes another step away from the traditional Fordian Western towards Leone. This is the West painted by Cezanne, a landscape familiar enough on the surface, but chopped up into geometric grids and patterns. You could forget about the story entirely and just marvel at the way Boetticher takes a recognisable monolith, the vast, arid West, and uses it as an easel; and takes the cumbersome film-making apparatus, cast and crew, and uses it like a paintbrush. Or scalpel.

Each astonishingly precise composition is riven by angles, lines, character positions, patterns, which connect with the angles, lines, character positions and patterns of the next frame, so that geometry of content meets the geometry of montage. These are not sterile theorems; within each frame the camera moves with a complex simplicity, shifting or rearranging the tenets of the composition, the relations of particular characters in space, like a kaleidoscope. I mentioned Cezanne, but there is Cubism too, the classical Hollywood method of representation broken up, scenes taken from different vantage points so that any stability on our part is impossible. It is truly beautiful.

When the Cahiers critics started looking at films as films in the 1950s, concentrating on their cinematic, formal elements, there was predictable reaction from many old-fashioned reviewers, usually British, who saw film as a humanist extension of literature. Penelope Houston even said that the proper study of film should not be spatial relations but character relations. She failed to see that the latter could not exist without the first, a character's relation, and reaction, to space formed character. It is in space that a character performs the actions that reveal his character. It is space, and a character's position in it, that yields insights simple narrative or dialogue would laboriously fumble at.

The great irony at the heart of 'Station' is that the vast, wide open spaces of the West are imprisoned in this formal grid, entrapping characters - the characters' reaction to this entrapment reveals, naturally, their character, as well as shaping the narrative. For instance, a man of Cody's decency and integrity a few decades previously might have been a great frontiersman, civilising the West, creating America. In this world, however, where the old monochrome values are no longer viable, where it's not simply a case of slaughtering Indians, where the frontier spirit has congealed into genocide and murderous greed, he must cut himself off from society, community, fertility, in effect killing off his race, a dead man.

Indeed, the beautiful idea of a man wandering the West for years looking for his probably dead wife, broods with the force of Greek mythology, Orpheus in the Underworld, say, seeking Eurydice, in this case never finding her. The West has become Hell - endless, repetitive, arbitrary, with the ghosts of your past returning to haunt you, never totally exorcised. The film ends with the opening shot in reverse - there is no progress here - the final scene with Nancy is tremendously moving.

Even the old hero/villain divide is ambiguous - Cody owes his life to a genocidal enemy; the fundamentally decent Frank sees no economic choice other than being an outlaw; Cody's stern values aren't adaptable enough to comprehend everything. There is a real homoerotic charge in the relationship between Frank and Dobie which has lasted most of their lives - when Dobie is found floating down the river, an arrow in his back, found by his soaking, grieving buddy, the martyrdom of St. Sebastian comes immediately to mind.