by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Enter the
Lone Ranger, a 1949 production that was
created as a pilot for the Lone Ranger TV series but was also shot to run as long as a feature film (albeit a
“B” feature), which I presume was so that if the producers couldn’t sell the
series to television they could still get some of their money back by releasing
it theatrically. (Apparently the film was cut up and used as the first three
episodes of the TV series.) It’s a perfectly workmanlike “B” Western, directed
effectively by George B. Seitz, Jr. from his own script based on the character
created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker. (He was the producer of the
radio show and she was the actual creator of the character, though her only
credit here is as “editor” of the script.) As the title suggests, the show
tells the origin story of the Lone Ranger: he was one of a company of six Texas
Rangers and his real name was John Reid (Clayton Moore). His unit was commanded
by his brother, Captain Dan Reid (Tristram Coffin), and when the show opens
they are after the gang led by outlaw Butch Cavendish (former Frankenstein
Monster Glenn Strange). They’re visited by Collins (George Lewis), a half-breed
who shows up with a wound in his arm he got from the Cavendish gang, and he
offers to lead them to the Cavendish hideout — only it’s a trap: he’s been
assigned to ambush the Rangers and lead them into a closed-off valley where the
Cavendishes can pick them off. The trap works, only Collins gets shot in the
back by one of the gang members on the ground that if he could betray the
Rangers he could betray them just as easily, though he survives — and so does one Lone Ranger, John
Reid, who’s desperately wounded but still alive as he makes his way to a spring
of water (the location appears to be the same one that was used as the good
guys’ hideout in the film Flame of Araby — indeed just about all the locations here are mind-numbingly familiar from innumerable
previous “B” Westerns) and is then discovered and rescued by his old friend
Tonto (Jay Silverheels), whose life he saved when they were both boys and who
nicknamed him “Kemo Sabe,” which — just in case you were wondering all those
years — means “Trusty Scout.” (Apparently the names of “Tonto” and “Kemo Sabe”
came from one of the other writers on the original radio show, William Jewell;
“Kemo Sabe” was the name of a summer camp in upstate Michigan and “Tonto” meant
“wild one” in the language of the Native tribes in Michigan, though many people
have assumed that “Tonto” was named after the Spanish word for “fool.”)
Once
he’s nursed back to health, the Lone Ranger decides to stay in the
crime-fighting business but always to wear a mask (he wants people to think
John Reid is dead and, indeed, he goes so far as to dig himself a false grave
next to the ones of the five Rangers in his original party who were killed by the Cavendishes) and always shoot to
wound or incapacitate, not kill. Meanwhile, Butch Cavendish decides to take
over the nearby town of Colby (Charles joked that afterwards they were going to
go after the towns of Mozzarella and Limburger) by assassinating all the civic
leaders and bringing in his own gang members to take their places. The Lone
Ranger figures out the plot and tries to alert the sheriff, “Two-Gun” Taylor
(Walter Sande), to it by sending Tonto (which couldn’t help but remind me of
Bill Cosby’s old joke about how the Lone Ranger would always send Tonto to town
and Tonto would have the crap beaten out of him — Cosby fantasized that at one
point, Tonto would say, “No, Tonto no go to town,” and when the Lone Ranger
would say, “But Tonto, I need you to go to town to get the information,” Tonto
would say, “Information say Tonto no go to town”) to get the sheriff to raise a
posse, but the sheriff — influenced by his deputy, who unbeknownst to him is
one of Butch Cavendish’s plants — refuses. Eventually the Lone Ranger and Tonto
repair to the silver mine the Lone Ranger owned and operated before he joined
the Texas Rangers in the first place (he had to have somewhere he could get the silver metal for all those
bullets! Mad magazine’s early parody
had him frantically searching the ground wherever he’d been involved in a
shoot-out and recovering his spent ammunition because “it’s plumb hard to come
by them silver bullets!”) and they hook up with the Ranger’s old friend Jim
Blaine (Ralph Littlefield), who’s being framed for the murder of Collins (ya
remember Collins?).
Eventually, of course,
it ends with the good guys winning and the Lone Ranger deciding to keep going
as a crimefighter — and to keep wearing his mask, shooting silver bullets,
avoiding killing whenever possible (on the ground that the law, not one man,
should decide whether a particular person should die for his crimes) and
playing a fortissimo
rendition of the William Tell Overture by Rossini behind his opening and closing credits. (I’ve been
to concerts where people have been told the William Tell Overture is the source of the Lone Ranger theme but not that the Lone Ranger music doesn’t appear until the final three minutes
of the piece — and they usually fidget through the preceding 10 minutes waiting
for it with growing impatience. I also loved the way Mad satirized the ubiquity of the theme music: their Lone Ranger carried around a portable record
player so he could blast the William Tell Overture wherever he went.) Enter the Lone Ranger isn’t much as a movie but it’s certainly a great
salute to a myth — the Lone Ranger had originated as a local radio program in
1933 and was already a popular character and even a legendary one by the time
it hit TV via this program — and there’s a reason why Clayton Moore (as disappointing as his
previous career has been — watching him as an FBI agent in Black Dragons, one of Bela Lugosi’s muddled Monogram vehicles,
he looks about six inches shorter and considerably nerdier than he does as the
Lone Ranger) and Jay Silverheels have become so iconic in these roles that
attempts to do more recent Lone Ranger filmizations with other actors have
routinely flopped. From out of the past … the Lone Ranger rides again!
