Comanche Station

Jefferson Cody rides into Comanche country alone. He has goods with him and makes a trade: he buys a woman. Mrs Lowe was taken years ago and her husband has posted a reward. Cody sets out to take her home. On the road they meet three men. Ben Lane is a former officer; he was dismissed from the army and knows Cody. The two young men with him know about the reward and reckon it holds dead or alive. Five people ride the same road. Cody has a reason of his own and tells nobody. Budd Boetticher directs; Burt Kennedy wrote the screenplay. Randolph Scott plays Cody and Claude Akins plays Lane; Nancy Gates is in the cast. It is the last of the westerns Boetticher made with Randolph Scott; the run consists of seven films and is cited as a group. They were made on low budgets in short shoots; all of them play out in the same region, among rock formations in California. The matter it treats is why a man keeps searching; Cody's reason opens at the end. The narrative does not show the villain as one dimensional; Lane has a logic of his own and the two men respect each other. It runs around seventy five minutes and the narrative lingers nowhere. The narrative also works at the woman's position; why her husband did not come for her himself is not left unasked. Its limit is scale; the budget shows and the cast is small. Who it is for: viewers who like classic westerns and plain narrative. Who it is not for: it is short, the plot simple, and the depiction of Native peoples belongs to its period.