Review of Comanche Station (1960) by Zoran S — 03 Jun 2010

Brilliant final Ranown western staring Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher, this time with Scott's lonely wanderer rescuing Nancy Gates from the Comanche, but finding an equal foe in Claude Akins, who is looking to cash in on some reward money.

Akins, as the somewhat sympathetic villain, has a key monologue that mirrors, almost exactly, Lee Marvin's from "Seven Men From Now", also written by Burt Kennedy, and in lesser hands it would feel like the wheels falling off a lucrative franchise, and maybe it was, but Boetticher handles the familiar material with his usual carefully planned use of rocky landscape and precision editing to turn a nominal cowboys and Indians and bounty hunters yarn into a game of psychological and physical warfare.