IMDb RATING
7.0/10
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A man saves a woman who had been kidnapped by Comanches, then struggles to get both of them home alive.A man saves a woman who had been kidnapped by Comanches, then struggles to get both of them home alive.A man saves a woman who had been kidnapped by Comanches, then struggles to get both of them home alive.
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Did you know
- TriviaLast of the "Ranown Westerns", produced by Randolph Scott and his partner Harry Joe Brown under the Ranown Pictures banner. Scott decided to retire after this one, but two years later he was talked out of retirement by Sam Peckinpah for Ride the High Country (1962). After that film, Scott retired for good.
- GoofsDuring the final shootout with Claude Akins, Randolph Scott and Nancy Gates run and hide in a small rock cave in the hills. As they look out of the cave, a crew member in a blue shirt stands in the path in front of them. When Randolph Scott leaves the cave, he runs right past this crew member.
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Guardian Interview with Budd Boetticher (1994)
Featured review
The cinematic equivalent of a modernist painting.
The Western takes another step away from the traditional Fordian Western towards Leone. This is the West painted by Cezanne, a landscape familiar enough on the surface, but chopped up into geometric grids and patterns. You could forget about the story entirely and just marvel at the way Boetticher takes a recognisable monolith, the vast, arid West, and uses it as an easel; and takes the cumbersome film-making apparatus, cast and crew, and uses it like a paintbrush. Or scalpel.
Each astonishingly precise composition is riven by angles, lines, character positions, patterns, which connect with the angles, lines, character positions and patterns of the next frame, so that geometry of content meets the geometry of montage. These are not sterile theorems; within each frame the camera moves with a complex simplicity, shifting or rearranging the tenets of the composition, the relations of particular characters in space, like a kaleidoscope. I mentioned Cezanne, but there is Cubism too, the classical Hollywood method of representation broken up, scenes taken from different vantage points so that any stability on our part is impossible. It is truly beautiful.
When the Cahiers critics started looking at films as films in the 1950s, concentrating on their cinematic, formal elements, there was predictable reaction from many old-fashioned reviewers, usually British, who saw film as a humanist extension of literature. Penelope Houston even said that the proper study of film should not be spatial relations but character relations. She failed to see that the latter could not exist without the first, a character's relation, and reaction, to space formed character. It is in space that a character performs the actions that reveal his character. It is space, and a character's position in it, that yields insights simple narrative or dialogue would laboriously fumble at.
The great irony at the heart of 'Station' is that the vast, wide open spaces of the West are imprisoned in this formal grid, entrapping characters - the characters' reaction to this entrapment reveals, naturally, their character, as well as shaping the narrative. For instance, a man of Cody's decency and integrity a few decades previously might have been a great frontiersman, civilising the West, creating America. In this world, however, where the old monochrome values are no longer viable, where it's not simply a case of slaughtering Indians, where the frontier spirit has congealed into genocide and murderous greed, he must cut himself off from society, community, fertility, in effect killing off his race, a dead man.
Indeed, the beautiful idea of a man wandering the West for years looking for his probably dead wife, broods with the force of Greek mythology, Orpheus in the Underworld, say, seeking Eurydice, in this case never finding her. The West has become Hell - endless, repetitive, arbitrary, with the ghosts of your past returning to haunt you, never totally exorcised. The film ends with the opening shot in reverse - there is no progress here - the final scene with Nancy is tremendously moving.
Even the old hero/villain divide is ambiguous - Cody owes his life to a genocidal enemy; the fundamentally decent Frank sees no economic choice other than being an outlaw; Cody's stern values aren't adaptable enough to comprehend everything. There is a real homoerotic charge in the relationship between Frank and Dobie which has lasted most of their lives - when Dobie is found floating down the river, an arrow in his back, found by his soaking, grieving buddy, the martyrdom of St. Sebastian comes immediately to mind.
Each astonishingly precise composition is riven by angles, lines, character positions, patterns, which connect with the angles, lines, character positions and patterns of the next frame, so that geometry of content meets the geometry of montage. These are not sterile theorems; within each frame the camera moves with a complex simplicity, shifting or rearranging the tenets of the composition, the relations of particular characters in space, like a kaleidoscope. I mentioned Cezanne, but there is Cubism too, the classical Hollywood method of representation broken up, scenes taken from different vantage points so that any stability on our part is impossible. It is truly beautiful.
When the Cahiers critics started looking at films as films in the 1950s, concentrating on their cinematic, formal elements, there was predictable reaction from many old-fashioned reviewers, usually British, who saw film as a humanist extension of literature. Penelope Houston even said that the proper study of film should not be spatial relations but character relations. She failed to see that the latter could not exist without the first, a character's relation, and reaction, to space formed character. It is in space that a character performs the actions that reveal his character. It is space, and a character's position in it, that yields insights simple narrative or dialogue would laboriously fumble at.
The great irony at the heart of 'Station' is that the vast, wide open spaces of the West are imprisoned in this formal grid, entrapping characters - the characters' reaction to this entrapment reveals, naturally, their character, as well as shaping the narrative. For instance, a man of Cody's decency and integrity a few decades previously might have been a great frontiersman, civilising the West, creating America. In this world, however, where the old monochrome values are no longer viable, where it's not simply a case of slaughtering Indians, where the frontier spirit has congealed into genocide and murderous greed, he must cut himself off from society, community, fertility, in effect killing off his race, a dead man.
Indeed, the beautiful idea of a man wandering the West for years looking for his probably dead wife, broods with the force of Greek mythology, Orpheus in the Underworld, say, seeking Eurydice, in this case never finding her. The West has become Hell - endless, repetitive, arbitrary, with the ghosts of your past returning to haunt you, never totally exorcised. The film ends with the opening shot in reverse - there is no progress here - the final scene with Nancy is tremendously moving.
Even the old hero/villain divide is ambiguous - Cody owes his life to a genocidal enemy; the fundamentally decent Frank sees no economic choice other than being an outlaw; Cody's stern values aren't adaptable enough to comprehend everything. There is a real homoerotic charge in the relationship between Frank and Dobie which has lasted most of their lives - when Dobie is found floating down the river, an arrow in his back, found by his soaking, grieving buddy, the martyrdom of St. Sebastian comes immediately to mind.
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- Feb 26, 2001
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Details
- Runtime1 hour 13 minutes
- Aspect ratio
- 2.35 : 1
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