Lonely As The Night: Randolph Scott in COMANCHE STATION (Columbia 1960)

COMANCHE STATION was the final entry in the Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher/Burt Kennedy series of Westerns, and in many ways a fitting ending. 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. He bargains with hostile Comanches for a captive white woman named Nancy Lowe, wife of a wealthy rancher. Stopping at Comanche Station, Cody and Mrs. Lowe encounter three men being chased by the tribe.

We learn one of these men is Ben Lane, a bounty hunter who shares a dark past with Cody. 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 also learn Mrs. Lowe’s husband is offering a five thousand dollar reward for her return – dead or alive. 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 must ride to Lordsburg on their own, with those scalphunters close behind. 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.

Scott is stoic as Cody, a man whose wife was captured by Comanches ten years earlier, and has been searching for her ever since. His singlemindedness of purpose has led him to a life of bartering for the release of captive white women in hopes of finding her. He’s the eternal Wandering Cowboy, cursed by fate to search for his love, a search that has so far been in vain. Claude Akins as Lane is a smiling menace with an evil laugh who has ideas of his own about what to do with Mrs. Lane. Nancy Gates (SUDDENLY ) does good work here as Mrs. Lane, and the small cast also features Skip Homeier and Richard Rust as Lane’s accomplices.

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. 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. It was finally released in 1972 to no great acclaim. 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.

As 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 another Western, by a new young director, delineating the contrast between the Old West and the New. The film was 1962’s RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. The director? Sam Peckinpah.