COMANCHE STATION

"Comanche Station" was just one of a handful of truly great westerns that Randolph Scott made with director Budd Boetticher over a five year period between 1956 and 1960. It may be the best; these short, lean, psychologically astute and hugely exciting pictures defined the West without romanticising it in any way. Often they dealt with the themes of revenge and retribution with Scott's character seldom lily-white. There was usually a journey involved and a woman, more often than not in need of Scott's protection, and several villains, so beautifully drawn in the scripts of Burt Kennedy that they usually transcended the caricatured villainy of western bad guys to emerge as altogether more complex characters.

In "Comanche Station" Scott finds himself rescuing white woman Nancy Gates from the Comanches and escorting her back to her husband. They are joined on the way by Claude Akins and his gang whose motives in wanting to keep Gates alive are, shall we say, somewhat less noble. The younger members of Akins' gang are played by Skip Homeier and Richard Rust and there is an almost homoerotic element to their relationship. You could always rely on Kennedy and Boetticher to dig deeper than the surface. It was also magnificently photographed in Cinemascope by Charles Lawton Jr. Essential viewing.