Comanche Station

Quite some time back, I bought a cheap box set of Randolph Scott westerns. I've already blogged about several of the films in the set because TCM ran a night of four of the films. But one that I hadn't blogged about before is Comanche Station. So I recently fired up the DVD player and watched it.

Randolph Scott plays Jefferson Cody, who at the start of the movie is riding through a desolate part of the west, before he's intercepted by a bunch of Indians. Unsurprisingly they take him back to their camp; surprisingly, it's what Cody wants. The thing is, there's a white woman who was taken hostage some months back, and Cody goes into Comanche country and pays ransoms for these whites. That woman, Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates) lives near Lordsburg with her farmer husband.

Presumbaly, having paid the ransom on Nancy, Cody should have free passage to go through Comanche country to get back to Lordsburg. However, that doesn't mean that there's nobody who could be a danger. There's a stagecoach station that is apparently still in Comanche territory but that the Indians don't harass, having no reason to do so. But when Cody and Nancy show up there to water their horses, they find someone who is wanted by the Comanche, that being Ben Lane (Claude Akins). Ben has apparently had run-ins with the Comanche before, enough that they'll come after him any time they see him.

Ben isn't alone, either, being accompanied by two young men, Dobie (Richard Rust) and Frank (Skip Homeier), who have fallen in with Ben and turned to the bad side because it's the less difficult thing to do, they believe. They find out that Nancy's husband has a reward out for her return, but that he's going to pay it out whether Nancy is returned dead or alive. This gives Ben the idea of killing Nancy and collecting the reward on the dead body, something which the two young men are mildly uncomfortable about and which Cody isn't about to countenance.

But the Comanche show up looking for Ben, meaning that all of them have to leave the stagecoach station and head back to Lordsburg through Comanche territory with the Indians after them, and with Ben plotting a way to do in both Cody and Nancy.

Comanche Station is a western that doesn't really cover any new ground, but one which is very competently made, thanks to the high quality of the crew working on it. Burt Kennedy wrote the script, and Budd Boetticher directed. There's some good dialog and a good story, and nobody is over the top. For 75 minutes of solid entertainment, you definitely won't go wrong watching Comanche Station.

I found the print to be surprisingly good considering that this is a cheap Mill Creek box set. With three movies to a DVD, you'd wonder at the quality, and maybe it might be noticeable if you've got a 4K TV, which I don't (I've got a 12-year-old ~31-inch TV, so beyond a certain point I guess I'm not going to notice any improvements in picture quality; this one is past that point). But still, it's a great price.