From the Rental Vault: Station and Town

The last of the "Ranown Series" of Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, Comanche Station (1960) tells the story of sometime bounty hunter Jefferson Cody, who has made a habit of ransoming white women taken captive by Comanche raiders. Cody lost his own wife that way and his obsession relates to the next-to-impossible chance that he will find her one day.

As he returns the rescued woman Nancy Lowe (Nancy Gates) to her home, the pair are joined by a rough-and-ready trio led Ben Lane (Claude Akins), themselves bounty hunters who prove much readier to straddle the legal line than Cody. Cody's own history with Lane makes him leery of sharing a journey and all too familiar with Lane's murky sense of right and wrong. He will have all he can handle to make sure both he and Nancy Lowe make it home safe amid danger from pursuing Comanches and their own companions.

Like the rest of the Boetticher-Scott compilations, the simplicity of the story and cast strengthen the movie and use Scott's acting gifts to their best effect. He's a straight shooter in every sense of the word, as a contrast to Akins' Ben Lane. Lane shows as much bravery, strength and humor in many cases as Scott himself, but his willingness to cross the line of legality mean the two men can only be opponents. The easy-going Akins sells this idea well.

No genres are subverted in Comanche Station, and no themes and ideas revised. It's a straight-ahead cowboys-and-villains-and-Indians story, showing how some ordinary people in extraordinary situations deal with the fire: Some lose their dross, but some are consumed.

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The conventional wisdom in movies these days is that studio movies are CGI-laden blockbusters with formula plots, writing and characters. True creativity and performing genius, we are told, happens in independent films, where people who really love movies work, dedicating long hours to achieving the dream of having their ideas find the screen. There, the cineaste says, lies the true greatness of 21st century moviemaking.

And then there's 2004's The King of Iron Town. It's indie, it has indie actors, an indie setting, an indie director and so on, but it's strictly pedestrian in plot, acting and execution. Tyler Wells (Mickey Fisher) is a former high school sports star feeling his age as he nears 30 (?). He seems stuck in a dead-end job at a local manufacturing facility, where his inability to string together successive days of mature behavior threatens his ability to stay working. He loves his wife Hope (Kate Airrington) but lacks a lot of maturity in that role too. It's hard to suggest he develop that maturity, though, when his attempts to heal a breach with his younger brother Gabe (Dominic Bogart, probably no relation) -- the most adult thing he's doing -- have little success.

A chance to compete in the Iron Masters King of the Ring boxing contest offers Terry a chance to...well, what exactly is tough to say. A last hurrah? Proof he's still a jock? Something to be proud of? King doesn't really know, and none of the cast is good enough to offer a solution to be ferreted out of the unfocused script.