by Douglas Messerli
Burt Kennedy (screenplay), Budd Boetticher
(director) Comanche Station / 1960
The last of Budd Boetticher’s westerns with actor Randolph
Scott, Comanche Station, presents a
familiar pattern for those who have seen his films. Although the movie begins
with hero Jefferson Cody seeming to be captured by Comanche Indians, it soon
again becomes apparent that the more dangerous enemies are the renegade
cowboys. For Cody has purposely sought out the tribe to trade for a white woman
whom they have captured. Although we are not told until late in the film, we
discover that Cody’s wife has been taken ten years before, and during the
lonely years since he has continued to seek her out, trading for the lives of
many captured pioneer wives.
It only takes a
few minutes after the woman’s release before writer Burt Kennedy and director
Boetticher begin a series of humorous and, at times, near-absurd dialogues that
pepper their cinematic collaborations. In response to Cody’s bemused question,
“All right, what’s your name?” the woman answers straightforwardly: “Nancy.
Lowe,” to which Cody oddly replies, “I should have known.” A few minutes later,
Nancy says, “So you came after me. Why?” “I thought it was a good thing,” wryly
responds the former soldier. It is often the verbal wit of these films more
than the inevitable action scenes that makes Boetticher’s works so original.
As the two ride
in to Comanche Station, a way station typical of the Kennedy stories, they are
met with three outlaws, Ben Lane (Claude Akins) and his younger partners Frank
and Dobie. Cody has known Lane from army life of long ago, when Lane had so
brutally killed Indians that Cody, then a major, testified against him,
resulting in a court martial for Lane. Lane and his followers, it seems, have
been on the track of Mrs. Lowe, determined to bring her back for the reward of
$5,000 offered by her husband.
In several of
the films of this series, the Randolph Scott figure, in his need for temporary
friendship, seems almost to admire some of the young villains he encounters,
and a kinship is often established between the obviously “good” cowboy and the
“bad” men. Dobie recognizes Cody immediately as a good man, a man of the type
his father had wished he might become, a man who to his way of thinking has
“amounted to something”:
dobie: A man does one thing, one thing
in his life he could look back
on…go proud.
That’s enough. Anyway, that’s what my pa used
to say.
frank: He talked all the time, didn’t
he.
dobie: Yeah. He was a good man. Sure is
a shame.
shame: Shame?
dobie: Yeah, my pa. He never did amount
to anything.
Unlike the other
villains of this series, however, Ben Lane has no intentions of giving up his
evil ways and settling down to farm life. Accordingly, he is perhaps one of
Boetticher’s least appealing villains. But the other two men, particularly the
young, “gentle” Dobie, who cannot abide the idea of killing the woman, offer
Cody more kinship.
Dobie would
clearly like to fulfill his father’s desire. And in his profound loneliness,
Cody offers him a way out that is as close to an offer of deep friendship—and
an obviously homoerotic relationship—as we have seen in this genre to date.
dobie: Me and Frank were riding together
up Val Verde Way. Frank was
alone, same as
me. And we heard about this fella who was looking
for some guns.
We’ve been with him ever since.
jefferson cody: You’ll end up on a rope,
Dobie. You know that.
dobie: Yes, sir.
jefferson cody: You could break with
him.
dobie: I’ve
thought about that. I’ve thought about that a lot. Frank says, “A man
gets used to a
thing.”
jefferson cody: Dobie, when we get to
Lawrenceburg, you can ride with me
for a ways. A
man gets tired being all the time alone.
The boy
practically gushes in appreciation like a courted maiden. Sadly, fate
determines that Dobie will not escape. While on lookout, Frank is killed by the
Comanche’s, and Dobie is forced to stay with Ben. After crossing Comanche
territory, Cody steals their rifles and sends them off into the wilds in order
to protect the woman and save his own life.
As we have
already been told, however, Lane has a plan. Having hidden away another rifle,
he insists that Dobie wait for him at a point past where Cody and Mrs. Lowe
will have to pass. When Dobie refuses to participate, Lane shoots him in the
back.
The resounding
murder, however, saves Cody and the woman, and the inevitable showdown ends
with Lane’s death. Mrs. Lowe is returned to her husband, who we discover has
not himself come to save her because he is blind. Her physical beauty, so
readily observed by the other men, has meant nothing to him: like Cody, John
Lowe’s love is clearly a love that transcends.
The final view
we have of Jefferson is as he passes behind a large domed rock, coming into
view again at a far lower elevation from where we have just observed him. It is
as if Cody, a man who once amounted to something, without wife or even someone
“to ride with,” has collapsed into the landscape over which he formerly
prevailed.
Los Angeles,
October 19, 2008
All three essays reprinted from Nth Position [England] (October 2008).
Reprinted from Reading
Films: My International Cinema (2012).
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