Peckinpah's mountain western looks ever so green and naturalistic in contrast to the monumental, high Renaissance compositions of Boetticher's Comanche Station. The story follows a resolute Randolph Scott in inexorable search of his wife, who has been kidnapped by Indians: basic-western-plot no. 4, perhaps, but a terse script and the thoroughness of Boetticher's vision have placed Comanche Station in the company of classics. Paul Schrader, author of Transcendental Cinema, has compared the Boetticher protagonist to those of Bresson (A Condemned Man Escaped, Diary of a Country Priest); and Eric Sherman and Martin Rubin, in The Director's Event, explicate the Boetticher style: “The opening shots of (Comanche Station) show, in long-shot, a lone rider moving through the empty desert. The point of view changes frequently and gracefully, and we see a man apparently at ease in his environment. As we move closer, however, this relationship dissolves. The desert turns into a foreboding moonscape, inhabited by hostile, almost prehistoric savages. Boetticher's films present a seemingly fluid relation between man and his environment which, like quicksand, gives way under scrutiny.... In opposition to their environment, Boetticher's heroes assign rigid roles for themselves. The director's geometric sense of composition, which fixes each character in a rigid scheme, reflects the moral story he tells....”