Probably the single most famous cowboy in all of American Western lore, The Lone Ranger,was not born in the fevered mind of a pulp writer or borrowed from the pages of literature.Rather, he was created in committee meetings at a small, struggling independent radio stationin Detroit, Michigan, in 1933. WXYZ, an independent station owned by John H. King andGeorge W. Trendle, was in dire need of a program to boost its flagging ratings and competewith the network stations, and the Lone Ranger turned out to be their salvation.

The Lone Ranger was created as a wholesome, uncomplicated hero who rode the range onhis trusty steed Silver, encountering a new adventure each week as he fought to right wrongsthroughout the ever-expanding Western frontier. The vast majority of the early writing wasdone by a freelancer named Fran Striker, who at one point was writing 156 Lone Rangerradio scripts a year in addition to a daily cartoon strip and a dozen novels. However, unlikeTarzan, who can be traced wholly through the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or SherlockHolmes, who was created solely by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Lone Ranger was a productof teamwork at WXYZ, with bits and pieces of his mythology and lore added by peoplewhose names have unfortunately been lost in the shuffle of history.

There was simply something magical about this particular character-- he spoke to a need forsomething pure that was not fulfilled by other pulp radio characters. Adored by children andadvertisers alike, the Lone Ranger soon became the most popular character on radio in the1930s, expanding to hundreds of stations across the world and eventually finding his wayinto cliffhanger movie serials and a long-running television show.

The TV show, which debuted in 1949, starred Clayton Moore as the masked hero and JaySilverheels as his trusted Native American companion, Tonto. Moore and Silverheels soonbecame synonymous with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, so it was of little surprise that theywere cast in the lead roles when Warner Brothers decided to expand the show onto the bigscreen in the late 1950s, one of the first times a major studio had gambled with the idea ofturning a TV show into a movie.

Unlike many recent big-screen adaptations of pulp characters and superheroes,The Lone Ranger (1956) made no attempt to expand upon orreimagine the characters. Rather, it was content to assume that all the viewers werecomfortably familiar with the Lone Ranger and Tonto's origins. (For those not familiar, theLone Ranger became a masked hero after he was wounded and five of his fellow TexasRangers were gunned down in an ambush by an evil gang and Tonto nursed him back tohealth.) The movie version is really little more than a longer episode of the TV show, whichis unfortunate because it restricts the possibilities, giving the movie a somewhat cramped andsmall-scale feel, despite its being shot in Technicolor on-location in gorgeous Kanab, Utah.Like the show, it has a somewhat goofy, anachronistic innocence that's fun, but neverparticularly compelling.

As with all Lone Ranger stories good are clearly marked from the bad. The plot involves acrooked land baron named Reece Kilgore (Lyle Bettger) and his hired gun, Cassidy (BobWilke), who are trying to stir up a war between a community of white settlers and thepeaceful Native Americans who live on a nearby reserve. The Lone Ranger and Tonto endup working largely as intermediaries between the two groups, trying to avoid an all-out warbetween them while tracking down clues about the Kilgore conspiracy.

Interestingly enough, despite the overall simplicities of the plot and characters, TheLone Ranger is surprisingly liberated in its views of Native Americans, even though itsaddles them with the kind of embarrassingly cliched dialogue that supposes they only knewthe present tense and were somehow incapable of using personal pronouns ("Him say ...").In this way, The Lone Ranger was part of a general move on the part ofHollywood Westerns toward more liberal views of Native Americans, at least since DelmerDaves' Broken Arrow (1950).

Screenwriter Herb Meadow seems to go out of his way, though, to portray the NativeAmericans as not only dignified, but also as a heterogeneous society. That is, he doesn'tportray them all as perfect embodiments of nobility, but rather as a complex society withcompeting ideologies. Hence, the elderly chief, Red Hawk (Frank DeKova), wants tomaintain peace at all costs, while the younger, fiery, and aptly named Angry Horse (MichaelAnsara) is as eager to engage in war as Kilgore is. While this narrative and charactercomplexity is refreshing, it is still difficult to get past the bad dialogue and the fact that, withthe exception of Silverheels, who was born the son of Mohawk chief on the Six NationsIndian Reservation in Ontario, Canada, the vast majority of the Native Americans are playedby Caucasians in obvious make-up.

Moore and Silverheels fill their lead roles well, and they have a strong on-screen chemistrythat makes their unlikely partnership that much more believable. Moore had had anenormously successful career starring in serials for Republic Pictures during its heyday inthe late 1930s and '40s, and he lends the Lone Ranger an unquestionably heroic and honestdemeanor. Of course, some of his dialogue is a bit awkward and stilted, which is even moreobvious in comparison to the realistic, so-called "adult" Westerns like John Ford's TheSearchers (1956) that were fast becoming the norm. Moore's campy blue costume alsoseems a bit out of place, especially as everyone else in the movie appears to be dressed inrealistic fashion.

Yet, out-dated polyester costumes and some clumsy dialogue are not at the heart of whyThe Lone Ranger falls short of all its could have been. More than anything, it'sjust not imaginative enough. The plot is good, but it's barely enough to sustain a 90-minutefeature. Director Stuart Heisler (The Glass Key) is solid, but never inspired, in hisdirection, and he gives the overall production something of a by-the-numbers feel; there's noreal spontaneity or ingenuity.

There are a few startling moments, such as when a character opens a hotel door after hearinga knock only to be shot several times through the wall. There are also some fairly daringstunts, including a final battle between the Lone Ranger and Cassidy that involves what hadto be an incredibly painful tumble down a steep hill. But, all in all, innovative moments arefew and far between, and what should have been a grand expansion of a popular mythologyinstead comes across as a small-screen episode blown out of proportion.

Two years later, The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Goldwas released, and while entertaining, it suffers from the same lack of imagination and limitedscope that hindered the first film. This time released through United Artists and directed byLesley Selander, a long-time veteran of dozens of serials and genre pictures, the movie startsoff as a mystery about a group of hooded outlaws who are murdering Native Americans.

Screenwriters Eric Freiwald and Robert Schaefer unveil the culprits and their motive early onby letting us know that the hooded outlaws are working for the wealthy Frances Henderson(Noreen Nash), who wants to become even wealthier by finding the location of a lost city ofgold. The Native Americans are being killed because they each possess a piece of a silverplate that, when put together, provide a map to the city's whereabouts.

Once again, it is up to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, again played by Moore and Silverheelsrespectively, to solve the mystery and stop the wrongdoing. Potential suspense is drainedout of the film because we already know who's to blame and what's going on, so it's amatter of sitting back and watching as the Lone Ranger dons a disguise as a Southern bountyhunter to try to solve the mystery. Some of the scenes between him and Frances areamusingly torpid, as Frances proves herself to by a wily, avaricious woman who is notabove back-stabbing, murder, and double-crossing to get what she wants.

The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold, like the first film, deals with racialtensions in fairly interesting ways, again showing sympathy for the plight of the NativeAmericans while still saddling them in stereotyped roles with cliched dialogue. The film doesbreak away from convention in its portrayal of Dr. James Rolfe (Norman Frederic), a NativeAmerican who can "pass" as a white man in town, right under the nose of the bigoted sheriff(Charles Watts). Rolfe has noble reasons for denying his heritage (passing as a white manallows him to give medical aid to other Native Americans), but the ultimate lesson is thatdenying one's race is never defensible.

The lost city of gold mentioned in the title fuels the narrative, but it doesn't appear until thefinal moments of the film. Its unveiling is somewhat anticlimatic, given the obviously limitedbudget for special effects and set design. The movie does have some fine moments scatteredthroughout, including a hilarious sequence where Tonto and his horse, Scout, lyingback-to-back, fight over a blanket like an old married couple. Such moments almost make upfor the otherwise mundane nature of the rest of movie.

Copyright ©2001 James Kendrick