Comanche Station **** (1960, Randolph Scott, Nancy Gates, Claude Akins) –  Classic Movie Review 6433

Randolph Scott’s penultimate movie (and the last in his series of seven marvellous Westerns with director Budd Boetticher) is this excellent 1960 widescreen B-Western with an archetypal plot about a rancher loner Jefferson Cody (Scott) who is pursuing his wife’s Indian kidnappers ten years earlier.

Instead, he rescues another woman, Nancy Lowe (played by Nancy Gates), and finds that the two of them are the targets of an evil bounty-hunter, Ben Lane (Claude Akins), who is after the bounty on her head.

Randolph Scott with Nancy Gates in Comanche Station, 1960.

The grizzled Scott slips comfortably into the saddle in a sterling, well-honed star turn in an extremely sturdy and intelligent Western outing that packs its intended punch. Boetticher directs it beautifully all on location in Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California. And Burt Kennedy’s taut screenplay (his fourth for the Scott-Boetticher team) is packed with action and relieved with some dark-toned humour.

Also in the cast are Skip Homeier, Richard Rust, Rand Brooks, Dyke Johnson, Foster Hood, Jope Molina and Vince St Cyr.

A Ranown production, released by Columbia, it is shot in Eastman Color by Charles Lawton Jr, produced by Harry Joe Brown and scored by Mischa Bakaleinikoff.

Scott’s last film is Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country [Guns in the Afternoon] (1962).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6433

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