What I watched: The twenty-fourth episode of the first season of The Lone Ranger, a kid-oriented Western created by George W. Trendle. This episode starred Clayton Moore as the titular hero and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, with guest appearances by William Challee, David Bruce and Gail Davis. This episode was directed by George Archainbaud and written by Tom Seller. “Buried Treasure” aired on Thursday, March 2 1950 at 7:30 PM on ABC, and is available to watch on YouTube.
What happens: A rather mild-voiced narrator tells us that in the Old West outlaws were usually captured and met justice, but sometimes try to escape. We see one such escape, a young man named Flint Foster (Challee) who scales the walls of his prison and shoots a guard. He steals a horse and escapes. A posse follows, with the story narrated by newspaper headlines.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto are already on the case. They think that Flint is heading for his brother Roy, who lives on the border. We then meet Roy (Bruce) and his feisty frontier wife Edith (Davis), who’s making dessert. Roy’s finally got all the money together to buy out the ranch that they live on. He also complains that Edith spends too much time in front of the mirror. Way to be a jerk, Roy.
The Ranger shows up at Roy’s house and gets a gun pointed at him. He blows it away. Thinking that they’re being robbed, Edith hides the coins in a cake pan under a bunch of batter. Roy fakes having a man with a gun in the next room, and the Ranger takes off. After he leaves, the evil Foster shows up and wants the gold. Flint starts ransacking the house.
Tonto’s found a friend, Sheriff Barnes. (The sheriffs in this show are always so unmemorable.) Back at the ranch, Roy tries to serve Flint the cake, but Edith stops him by dropping some not-so-subtle hints. The Ranger and the sheriff show up, and Flint hides. The couple offer the sheriff the cake, but he again says no and leaves. Now this is just getting silly.
Flint insists on eating some of the cake. Either he suspects something or he has as much of a sweet tooth as I do. The Ranger says that he saw the bad guy back at the house. He comes back just as soon as Flint loses his temper and smashes the cake on the ground, revealing the gold pieces.
The Ranger sneaks into the house, but a falling window lets Flint know he’s there. The bad guy gets the Ranger to drop his guns by holding Mrs. Foster hostage. Thad shoots what he thinks is the Ranger, but it turns out to be a reflection in Edith’s mirror. After some fisticuffs, Flint is subdued and returns to prison, and somebody hopefully gets to eat the cake.
What I thought: This week’s episode adds another genre to The Lone Ranger‘s typical melange of Western and children’s morality plays, that of farce. This mostly concerns the business with the coins baked into the cake, the titular “buried treasure.” The question of who wants the cake, and who doesn’t, generates humour through the use of dramatic irony — we know that Edith is trying to protect her husband’s fortune, but everyone else just thinks she’s oddly insistent about desert.
No one in the cast particularly plays this as comedy — there’s no mugging for the camera and no real punchlines. The Lone Ranger presents itself completely po-faced, perhaps to disguise the typical silliness of its plots. To a child watching the show, it would appear to be adult fare, but adult fare that they could access and understand. This is a form of presentation that would be gradually weeded out of children’s television.
There’s also a little bit of genuine cinemtaography to this episode. In particular the opening sequence, with its voice-over narration (by someone other than the typical narrator), its nighttime shots of the jail and the montage of newspaper headings, seems like something out of a different film — perhaps a film noir, or at least a cinematic Western. This sequence is almost incidental to the ultimate plot of the episode — it establishes Flint as having escaped from jail, but the rest of the story doesn’t really continue portraying him as a menace to society, instead being concerned with the misunderstandings of a married couple.
Indeed, the script disavows the sense of menace its introduction creates. The narration tells us that even in the wild west, criminal justice was strictly enforced, and lawmen frequently got their man. This would seem to contradict the premise of the series, that the law is not up to the task and so needs the help of an extra-judicial element in the Ranger and Tonto. It also contradicts what we see on screen, as Flint.escapes from a jail fairly easily.
What to make of this moment of double consciousness? Perhaps it expresses a fundamental contradiction of the series: that it tries to teach a respect for authority, portraying almost all of the sheriff characters in a positive light, but that the need to highlight the hero makes all of the lawmen ultimately incompetent. Or perhaps Archainbaud was just stretching his directorial muscles a bit, then needed to add a voice-over to reign it in. Either way, it’s the most interesting moment in a mostly uninteresting episode.
Coming up next: The last of the very-early episodes of What’s My Line.
The Eternal Couch Potato 