Comanche Station

Comanche Station (1960) is Budd Boetticher's lean western, free to watch online on iFILM. Lone rider Jefferson Cody buys a kidnapped woman back from the Comanche and starts the long ride to return her to her husband.

The real trouble begins on the way home. Three drifters led by Ben Lane fall in with Cody, drawn by the $5,000 bounty posted for Nancy Lowe — dead or alive — while a Comanche war party tracks them across the rocks. Randolph Scott plays a quiet man who has spent ten years searching for his own missing wife, which is exactly why he won't hand this one over.

This was the last of the Ranown cycle, the seven tight, low-budget pictures Boetticher and Scott made together at the turn of the 1960s. Critics and later filmmakers — Scorsese and Tarantino among them — kept returning to its stripped-down morality and the bleached Lone Pine landscape. Seventy-four minutes, not a frame wasted. Stream Comanche Station (1960) online on iFILM.