What I watched: The third episode of the second season of The Lone Ranger, a kid-friendly Western created by George Trendle and starring Clayton Moore as the titular hero and Jay Silverheels as Tonto. This episode was written by the excellently-named Joseph F. Poland, directed by George B. Seitz, and featured guest stars Stephen Chase, William Vedder, and Myron Healey. “Dead Man’s Chest” aired on Thursday, September 28, 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm., and is available on YouTube.
What happened: The Ranger and Tonto are hanging out with whimsical man who goes by Hamlet Jones (Vedder) with a horse named Horatio, a Shakespeare reference they take time to explain. Hamlet has a mysterious chest which the Ranger is not that curious about. They then investigate a stagecoach robbery, where the bandits made out with a big collection of bills traveling from town to town. The Ranger suspects a pair of bandits he’s familiar with, who travel from gang to gang.
He’s right as usual, as the two men bring a leather bag into a mine to leave it for their unknown employer. One of the men, Jud (Healey), doesn’t like the arrangement, but his partner calms his nerves. In the town, Hamlet is checking his mail and letting everyone know he’s struck it rich. It turns out the banking clerk Wheeler (Chase), who is only pretending to need a wheelchair, is the guy who hired the goons. Tonto listens into their conversation.
The goons break into Hamlet’s cabin, shoot him, and steal his chest. The Ranger arrives just in time to hear him gasp out the truth about the chest: it’s full of rare books, including a first edition of Shakespeare, and then die. Alas, we didn’t know him well. This guy’s just walking around with the First Folio. Ranger and Tonto fear that the goons will destroy or abandons the books.
As predicted, the brothers are disappointed in the contents of the chest, and think about burning them. The Ranger consults with the local sheriff, and tells him to put out a notice highlighting the value of the book in order to set a trap. This becomes the talk of the town, the latest thing. The brothers get a message telling them to retrieve the books from the mine, but this time our heroes are there to eavesdrop on them and follow them to the chest.
The Ranger holds up the goons and ties them up. Wheeler arrives in a lower-face mask and subdues him. (Tonto concussion count for the season: 2.) He then sets a fuse to blow the mine up. But the Ranger shows up to engage in a shootout and get rid of the explosives. Wheeler escapes, but the Ranger finds the tunnel he’s been using to escape, and confronts him in his mail-clerk disguise. After tricking Wheeler into getting up he punches him out, and turns over all the money he’s been hiding to the sheriff. The rare books will be sold to a local museum, with the money going to the town. I bet it ends up at Sotheby’s.
What I thought: Episodic dramas live and die by their guest stars. Heroes like the Lone Ranger are basically static, whereas guest characters have meaningful things happen in their life. Fortunately, this episode has a pretty good guest character — the Shakespeare-quoting, scenery-chewing Hamlet Jones. It’s not a very deep character, but it’s one that is entertaining enough for the ten minutes he’s on screen and a nice variation on the usual old coot prospectors.
“Dead Man’s Chest” gives a lot of time to its guest cast, with the Ranger and Tonto only really being involved in the resolution. I’m not crazy about the “guy pretending to be disabled” trope, but Stephen Chase is a perfectly fun schemer. And there’s a sheriff who… also exists. All we’re missing is a plucky young heiress for the full complement of Lone Ranger supporting cast types.
The references to Shakespeare are another example of how 1950s programs assumed a greater knowledge of high culture, even for a young audience. This is not to say that today’s kids’ shows wouldn’t make such a reference, but there would probably be a bit more context. Of course, the 8-year-old boys that The Lone Ranger was aimed at weren’t reading Hamlet as a rule, but references like this helped to build up the general idea of cultural prestige and mystique that surrounds the Bard. Maybe a kid might even be inclined to ask their parent or English teacher about it. It’s not much, but it’s worth noting in a series that usually so thoroughly avoids being educational content.
The main issue with this episode is that old Hamlet Jones gets killed off halfway through. The resolution aims to make things well by having the money from his book go to the town, but I didn’t care about the town half as much as the old man. I guess it was fate, though, with a name like that.
Coming up next: We put aside childish things and go out to the nightclub for The Morey Amsterdam Show.
The Eternal Couch Potato 