What I watched: The eighth 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. “Thieves’ Money” was written by Curtis Kenyon, directed by John H. Morse, and featured guest stars John Doucette, Charles Watts and David McMahon. “Drink of Water” aired on Thursday, October 26, 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm., and is available on YouTube.
What happened: A gang of crooks is examining some counterfeit money, marveling at the accuracy of the forgery by the ringleader Pierre Dumont (like the TV channel). However, they’re arrested by treasury agent Jim Collins (McMahon), who promises them they will be mistreated in prison. He was able to follow Dumont because of his fancy lad affectations, including wearing gasp cologne. But there’s one more crook, who shoots Cobb in the back. Dumont hatches a plan to impersonate Collins to keep the feds off their trail.
Men, what is stopping you from dressing like this?
The Ranger and Tonto finally ride into the story looking for a place to camp, where they find Collins’ body with Dumont’s papers on him. The Ranger has met with Dumont before, and notices that the body doesn’t match his memory. In town, Dumont’s impersonation has fooled the local sheriff, Andrews (Watts). The Ranger and Tonto arrive in the office, and act friendly with Dumont, handing over the papers and asking him to identify the body.
In the morgue, Collins gives a positive ID. The Ranger and Tonto search the area they found the body, finding a covered up trail. They follow the trail to the outlaws’ cabin, which stinks with cologne, and find briefcases of counterfeit money. The Ranger tells us that “counterfeit money can do just as much damage as the most vicious outlaw.” They resolve to set a trap for the crooks.
The bad guys have obtained a hotel room, and the goons hide in the closet while Dumont welcomes the Ranger and Tonto. The Ranger tells them that they found the hideout cabin and the counterfeit money. Dumont invites them to join in an ambush at the cabin. Of course, it’s actually an ambush against the heroes. The Ranger has already convinced the sheriff that Dumont is disguised as Collins, based on the whole cologne thing. He resolves to send a telegram to Washington to get a description of Collins, but this will take time, so the Ranger decides to go with a quicker and more violent method.
The heroes walk towards the ambush, but instead of heading in disarm Dumont. They tell him to put on his own Lone Ranger mask and head in (hey, there’s another mistaken identity.) Meanwhile, the Ranger sneaks in the back. Dumont yells his true identity at him, providing the proof that the authorities need (although the Sheriff is nowhere near, but whatever). We get some fisticuffs with the two goons, which ends with the two men tied up and taken into custody. The sheriff jovially informs them that they’ve been caught by the Lone Ranger, and it’s hi-ho Silver, away.
What I thought: This is another Lone Ranger episode that really relies on the charm of the villain of the week to distinguish it from the usual fare. Dumont is notable for his supposed intelligence and intellectual sophistication. The show has characters repeatedly comment on his wits, but ultimately he’s undone by his very illusion of being high class, as well as the Lone Ranger’s less ostentatious intelligence.
“Men, hand me my Axe Body Spray.”
The script for “Thieves’ Money” really doesn’t seem to trust the audience too much, making sure that every step in this duel of wits is explained in dialogue multiple times. It also takes the relatively easy shortcut of trying to make people care about the relatively banal crime of counterfeiting by having the perpetrator also do a murder.
Still, there are some good performances, featuring Lone Ranger all star (and Golden Potato winner) and John Doucette as Dumont as well as Charlie Watts imbuing all of the sheriff’s limited role with down-home bonhomie. Even Jim Collins makes a relatively big impression. So, even when the scripts are a little dumbed-down, the Lone Ranger’s troupe of regulars feel like they’re doing their best.
Coming up next: Kukla, Fran, and Ollie attempt a little Shakespeare.
What I watched: The seventh 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. “Drink of Water” was written by Joseph F. Poland, directed by John H. Morse, and featured guest stars Bill Kennedy, Arthur Stone, and Gregg Barton. “Drink of Water” aired on Thursday, October 26, 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm., and is available on YouTube.
What happened: The Ranger and Toto are wandering through a particularly desolate stretch of country. They’re running out of water, and the watering holes have all gone dry. The vegetation in the area seems very healthy, though. In town, a few men are having an argument, with one man believing that his father did a date to bring on the rain. They’re interrupted by Phinaeus Stacey (Kennedy), who claims he has a scientific way to bring on the rain. He takes them to a wagon full of all kinds of science-y equipment. Stacey tells them it’ll cost them $5000 from the village, but he won’t take the payment until the rain starts.
Shockingly, this guy is not on the up-and-up. He meets with a couple of goons, and it becomes clear that his plan is to have the town gather their money and then steal it from the safe. Meanwhile, the Ranger and Tonto find a young boy with his leg stuck under a rock. When they take him to his parents, his father Jim (Barton) holds a gun at them, afraid they’re going to take his water. His wife manages to talk him down. It turns out the kid, Jackie (Stone), has been growing up on stories of the Lone Ranger, although Jim still thinks he’s a mythological figure.
Go horse go!
Jackie tells them about Mr. Stacey the rainmaker. The guy from the town visits saying that they need Jim to pitch in. Stacey plays at being reluctant to strong-arm them, but Jim agrees to donate their savings of $500. The Ranger is suspicious and holds Stacey at gunpoint but isn’t able to get anything out of him. The money is put in the safe, and everyone leaves town to watch the explosions that are supposed to bring rain.
The bad guys decide to kidnap Jackie when he starts asking too many questions. When they find one of the Ranger’s silver bullets in his pocket, they realize that it’s the real deal. Tonto eavesdrops and runs away, but Stacey notices and lets him go to create a trap for the Ranger. It works, and all three get locked in a cabin with burning explosives, but Silver is able to rescue them by pulling out the bars of the window, thus representing the first time the very special horse has played a meaningful role in the plot. They get out just as the cabin blows up, of course.
The Ranger interrupts the robbery. This leads to a brief shoot-out, with the two goons subdued. Stacey is seemingly arrested off-screen, and Jackie’s parents look on beatifically as the Ranger ride off. Thunder sounds in the sky, meaning that these people aren’t all going to starve after all. Hooray!
What I thought: This episode of The Lone Ranger opens with a surprisingly real and mundane problem: there isn’t enough rain for the farms in the surrounding area. Western shows, especially kids’ Westerns, typically envision owning a ranch or farm as a grand adventure where you get to hang out with horses all day, but in real life the West was often a brutal and precarious place to make a living. It’s not really a problem that the Lone Ranger can solve, but droughts could be life-ruining. The end of the episode promises the arrival of rain, but agriculture is an unpredictable business.
Fortunately, there’s a human villain that the Lone Ranger can punch in the face. The “rainmaker” Stacey is not as memorable as past inventor characters, including last episode’s clock guy, but the straightforward nature of the performance is kind of an asset as well. You could almost see yourself trusting this guy, like the genial narrator of so many 1950s educational films.
One of the thing that helps Stacey’s believability is that rainmaking, or cloud seeding, was considered the forefront of technology in the 1950s. Major companies believed that they could manipulate the weather by bombarding clouds, and had some success with early experiments. Kurt Vonnegut’s brother Bernard was one of the scientists working on it, at General Electric. Of course, this technology was never fully adopted, but various countries have continued to attempt it well into the 21rst century.
They may have raided the sci-fi prop department for this episode.
The other interesting aspect of this episode is the dynamic between the Lone Ranger, Jim, and young Jackie. Jim basically thinks of the Lone Ranger as a man in a Santa costume, performing a fictitious role for his son, and in a sense he’s right. Clayton Moore is, after all, playing a role that predates him. It doesn’t quite fit with past episodes, where the Lone Ranger is known as a very real person in the West, but maybe this town is a real backwater.
There’s an obvious way in which Jackie is an audience surrogate, meant to let kids imagine themselves making friends with the Lone Ranger. In that case, perhaps Jim is also a surrogate for the imagined parental figure that allows their child to sit down and watch The Lone Ranger after dinner. This may all be cheap and corny, the show suggests, but isn’t it nice to let your kids believe in something?
Coming up next: Two of radio’s biggest stars come to TV with The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.
What I watched: The sixth 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. “Crime in Time” written by Herb Meadow, directed by John H. Morse, and featured guest stars Lane Bradford, John A. Butler, and Monte Blue. “Crime in Time” aired on Thursday, October 19, 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm., and is available on YouTube.
For a second I thought this might be Groucho Marx.
What happened: A man with a very complicated glasses set-up is the target of a stagecoach robbery. He’s sassy to the robbers and explains that he’s a watchmaker, carrying nothing but sand. He uses a fancy contraption in his car to shoot one of the robbers, and holds the other at gunpoint. The watchmaker then offers him a job in his operation, after he buries his partner.
The Ranger and Tonto are on the trail of the robbers, known as the Watkin boys. They find the watchmaker’s bag of dirt, and are ambushed by the remaining Watkin. He seems at least a little broken up by his brother’s death, and forces the Ranger and Tonto to bury him. As they dig he relates the story, and is unable to figure out the shooting car trick. Just as he’s about to make the Ranger unmask, Tonto blinds him with the ol’ fistful of dirt, and a horse chase ensues.
The Ranger fills in the local sheriff about what he’s discovered. The sheriff is sure that the local watchmaker, McArdle, couldn’t hurt anyone. In reality, he’s building an underground tunnel to rob the bank, explaining the bags of dirt he was disposing of. He switches out the money with counterfeit bills, which he calls “engravings.” The only issue is that a bank examiner is coming in a few days. McArdle wants Watkin to rob the bank to get rid of the counterfeit money.
They discover Tonto sneaking into the house, and he of course gets caught in the process. Tonto tries to escape, but gets a chair broken over his back. At least it wasn’t another concussion. The Ranger accosts McArdle in his stagecoach, but gets gutshot by the gun in it. He no-sells it, however, and follows the stagecoach at a distance.
When Watkin goes to rob the bank, he’s being watched by the Ranger and the Sheriff. McArdle thinks that Watkin is going to shoot him after the robbery as revenge for the killing of his brother, and shoots him right in front of the Sheriff, claiming self-defense. But the Ranger is still there, explaining that he replaced McArdle’s stagecoch gun with blanks. Despite saying “I thought I killed you”, McArdle continues to plead innocent. But Tonto is able to signal from the underground tunnel, and McArdle is arrested after his scheme is exposed. He curses that the Ranger is so smart.
What I thought: I wrote in my post on “Danger Ahead”, the previous Lone Ranger episode, about how the key to a great episodic series is good guest stars and fun gimmicks. “Crime in Time” has both in John A. Buutler as evil watchmaker Feeny McArdle. Maybe it’s just because I love vaguely steampunk stuff in the Old West, but McArdle and his weird glasses and stage coach-mounted gun immediately stood out amidst a sea of grizzled toughs.
The Lone Ranger frequently utilizes a kind of Columbo-esque structure. The Ranger is confronted with a mystery but we, as the audience, already know the answer – it’s just a question of how the Ranger will figure it out in time. The Lone Ranger typically parcels out the mystery answers a bit more than Columbo, mind you – we don’t know what McArdle is doing with the bags of dirt until about ten minutes into the episode, after the Ranger and Tonto have already started investigating.
This episode, like most, turns into the Ranger trying to figure out the villain’s scheme and prove his guilt. McArdle is stronger than your average villain because he’s clearly a man who relies upon his mental prowess, and it’s more plausible that a gunslinger like the Ranger could get tricked by him than by your average rustler. (This is also why so many Superman villains are primarily defined by their intelligence.) Notably, McArdle doesn’t even try to put up a fight at the end, making this a fairly fisticuffs-free episode of the show.
McArdle dug a very spacious tunnel.
If anything, the flaw here is that McArdle is too likeable. His plan seems like the least disruptive and violent way to possibly rob a bank, and you sort of want him to get away with it. Maybe if they had shown someone being wrongfully arrested for passing his counterfeit bills there would have been better moral stakes, I don’t know. But as it is, McArdle is the great American archetype: a hustler whose ingenuity makes you forget about his immorality.
John A. Butler was not a very well-known actor. For one thing, he was usually credited under just John Butler. Most of his film appearances are as small, uncredited roles in B-movies. IMDb says that he is best known for appearing in Torchy Runs for Mayor, which is to say that he wasn’t well-known at all. But he got a really fun role that he could do something with here, and made the most out of it.
Coming up next: We close out the week with some more Halloween prep on Kukla, Fran and Ollie.
What I watched: The fifth 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. “Danger Ahead” was written by Joe Richardson, directed by John H. Morse, and featured guest stars Don Haggerty, Max Terhune, and William E. Green. “Danger Ahead” aired on Thursday, October 12, 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm., and is available on YouTube.
What happened: We open at the “Boswell and Bosco” puppet show, where two higher-ups are laughing at some very mild humour. They’re introduced as Judge Jordan (Green) and Sheriff Roberts of the law-abiding town of Kingston. Look, I’ve been to Kingston, it’s not that tame. A gunman sneaks in and shoots the sheriff. But other than that, how was the play? The deputy, Rocky Craig (Haggerty), is appointed the new sheriff, but it’s quickly revealed that he was in league with the killer.
Boswell (Terhune) is the only guy who saw the killer, so Craig brings him in for harsh questioning. He tells Boswell he wants to use him as bait. The comedian gets spooked and leaves town, but it’s all part of Craig’s plan to have him be shot by two masked outlaws. We see Boswell in his wagon, talking to his puppet, even though no one else is around.
This finally brings the Ranger and Tonto into the story proper. Tonto is confused by the talking doll. After a few questions the heroic duo is on their way. The masked bandits, who are really just wearing bandanas around their mouths, start chasing Boswell. The Ranger and Tonto eventually ride to the rescue. The Loner (can I call him the Loner? Just for variety?) gives Boswell a scolding and tells him to go back to town to do his civic duty in identifying the suspect.
After Craig meets with his henchmen, the Ranger barges him to ask the Sheriff how he plans to protect Boswell. He seems convinced. Back at the camp, Boswell is showing Tonto how to throw his voice. Craig says he’ll keep Boswell in his house as protective custody, while the Ranger and Tonto go after the masked men.
It’s a microscopic amount of sarcasm, but it’s there.
Craig brings Boswell to his house and makes a show of asking him to identify his henchman, just to make sure he can do it. When Boswell identifies the man, Craig knocks him out. His next scheme is to be tied up to help lure in the Ranger, and pretend that the masked bandits took Boswell. This scheme seems to be working, although the Ranger distinctly gives him the side-eye upon finding him. The sheriff tells him to go to Devil’s Canyon.
The Ranger pulls up out of stock footage to tell Tonto that he’s realized Craig is lying because the coffee on his table was still hot. They double back and find Craig and his goons with Boswell tied up. The Loner (yeah, I’m going with it) comes in with both guns drawn. But the murderer is still unaccounted for, and helps the bad guys get the drop on the good guys. Boswell uses his voice-throwing abilities to make it sound as if Judge Jordan is there, which lets the good guys get the upper hand. The town gives Boswell a monetary reward, but the Ranger and Tonto are already riding away.
What I thought: A long-running episodic show is only as good s its ability to find elements that make familiar stories seem new — or, to be a little cruder, gimmicks. Fortunately, this episode has a pretty good gimmick, in the ventriloquist who ends up teaming up with the Ranger and Tonto. Every other part of the plot — the outlaw posing as an upstanding citizen, the opening murders leading to a final fistfight — is pretty standard, but when the ventriloquist saved the day by throwing his voice, I was hooting and hollering. (Well, not really. But I was having a good time.)
There’s an interesting potential here, in incorporating variety elements into a scripted series. We already have singing on Gene Autry, so The Lone Ranger is upping the ante with ventriloquism. Maybe next episode we’ll have a dancer who disarms the bad guys with a pirouette, or one of those strongman teams. If we’re going to get a cartoon version of the Old West, let’s make it as cartoon-y as possible.
At least they’re better than Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob
Max Terhune, who plays Boscoe, basically made a career out of being a ventriloquist in Westerns, which is the definition of something you could only do for a living in the 1940s and 50s. He appeared in several Gene Autry movies as a sidekick, and brought his dummy into the pictures as part of the Johnny Mack Brownseries of Westerns, which I have never heard of until this moment. This was towards the end of Terhune’s career, and he would only appear in three more movies and one more TV episode (which we should get to on this blog.) He was also an animal imitator, and magician. What a cool life.
This is also one of the rare episodes where the Lone Ranger doesn’t recognize who the bad guy is right away. Instead of being immediately on guard, he’s taken in by Rosco at the start, and only realizes the deception late in the game. Hey, that means there’s actually some dramatic tension! All in all, “Danger Ahead” seems like a significant improvement on the usual Lone Ranger formula. It’s still the same show, with all of its tropes and repetitions, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I normally do.
Coming up next: Kukla, Fran and Ollie celebrate their third anniversary
What I watched: The first 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 Harry Poppe Jr., directed by John H. Morse, and featured guest stars Emmett Lynn, Lucien Littlefield, Paul Fix and Kim Spaulding. “Million Dollar Wallpaper” aired on Thursday, September 14, 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm., and is available on YouTube, along with all the other Lone Ranger episodes on an official channel that I could swear wasn’t there before. Are you telling me I torrented all of season 2 for nothing?
What happened: The Ranger and Tonto are wandering around when they overhear gunshots. They come across two crusty men, Mosshorn (Emmett Lynn) and Flapjack (Lucien Littlefield) having an argument over land. Tonto comments that their guns are old too, and the Ranger watches them argue with a vacant smile of slight amusement. He quickly deduces that they’re really friends.
The old-timers take the Ranger and Tonto back to their shack, where he notices that the wallpaper is made up of deeds to a now-worthless mine and oil company. Based on the episode title, I’m pretty sure that it is not, in fact, worthless. Sure enough, we cut to a scene where prospector Matt finds big chunks of gold in the old mine. Two businessmen, Silk (Paul FIx) and Moose (Kim Spaulding) who had been planning to scam people into buying the worthless shares, decide to help get the shares back from the old coot Mosshorn. I have no idea which one is Silk and which one is Moose, so I will just be referring to them collectively.
Silk and Moose come by Mosshorn’s place, offering to buy the shares. He declines, so they just beat him up and start using their knives to take the certificates off the wall. Mosshorn goes for his gun, but ends up shooting the miner who found gold and knocking over a lamp, starting a fire. The other old coot, Flapjack arrives to find the house burnt down. The local sherriff finds the burnt body and Flapjack’s freshly-fired gun, and arrests the man who was feuding with the dead guy. The body also has a bullet from the old-timey guns Blackjack and Mosshorn carried, which is also not great for him. The Ranger and Tonto listen in and decide to investigate.
The shack is one of the most lived-in-looking sets we’ve seen on the series, but it does make you really lament the absence of colour.
In their mine office, the two businessmen are threatening Mosshorn to try to get him to sign over the stock. They throw him in a closet to try to soften him up. The Ranger comes in and quickly realizes what’s going on. Well, that was an easy investigation. An unfortunate post falls on the Ranger and Mosshorn, letting the bad guys lock them in the closet.
Silk and Moose plan to kill and bury their prisoners. Meanwhile, the Ranger disassembles his gun and uses its handle to unscrew the nails in the door. The Ranger bursts out of the door as a particularly triumphant song plays, and dodges the barrel thrown at him like he’s Mario. One of the villains gets shot by his partner in the scuffle, and flees on foot. The Ranger catches up with him, and brings him to justice. Flapjack and Mosshorn celebrate in the jail right in front of them, agreeing to share the money.
What I thought: This is officially the second-season premiere of The Lone Ranger, although viewers at the time probably didn’t notice a change — the “finale” to the 52-episode first season had just finished the previous week. There were “seasons” of TV and radio shows, largely because hosts wanted a break in the summer, but I’m not sure anyone had thought to count them or establish the first and last episodes as especially important. This season is only 26 episode, and there’s a pretty lengthy break after it, so the stream of Lone Ranger episodes is not as endless as it would first appear.
This is a pretty good Lone Ranger episode, mainly because it leans into the show being a live-action cartoon. Lynn and Littlefield’s performances as hoary old prospectors are over-the-top in a way that’s kind of necessary for a kid’s show like this, and add a sense of fun to proceedings. The stakes of the plot are fairly simple. The villains are a little nondescript, but fill their role fine.
For the most part, “Million-Dollar Wallpaper” avoids getting bogged down in the mistaken-identity schemes that drive so much of The Lone Ranger. There is a little of this, when Flapjack is arrested for Mosshorn’s murder, but the script actually does a good job establishing enough facts to make it reasonable someone would suspect him. It does feel like the investigative middle section of the plot has been cut out. The Ranger goes from not knowing what’s going on to confronting the bad guys pretty quickly.
Another common trope in these Lone Ranger episodes that I’m just starting to notice is the Ranger and other heroes being trapped in a small space, whether it be a basement, a jail cell, or a closet, as in this episode. Usually there’s some kind of temporal threat, such as this episode’s explosion or a lack of oxygen. Maybe this reflects the commonality of claustrophobia, or maybe it’s just an easy way to create tension without having to spend money on special effects or an elaborate set. Either way, it’s another ingredient in the stew of Lone Ranger plot tropes.
The gun handle thing was actually pretty clever.
These episodes are definitely more tolerable now that I’m not watching five of them in a row. Maybe the show is actually growing on me. Tonto didn’t even get concussed or anything. We’ll see how long into this season my good mood lasts.
Coming up next: KFO rounds out the week with “Fran, Girl Photographer.”
What I watched: The fifty-second and final episode of the first season 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 Curtis Kenyon and directed by John H. Morse, and featured guest stars Marin Sais, James Kirkwood and Rick Roman. “Double Jeopardy” aired on Thursday, September 7, 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm.
What happens: The Lone Ranger faces another board of Jeopardy clues, this time with the point values greeting each other. No, wait, actually the episode opens with two old guys talking to each other. One of the old guys, Judge Brady (Kirkwood) is planning to take the stand against Clyde Henshaw (Roman), part of a local gang family who shot a bank teller. In jail, the sheriff threatens the smooth-talking Clyde.
The Ranger and Tonto are also here to oversee proceedings.They track down Ma Henshaw (Sais), the mother of the gangster brothers and see her and one of her sons meeting with Judge Brady. The Henshaws have taken Brady’s daughter hostage to get him to change his testimony. They want to get Clyde acquitted so that he can’t be charged again, under the titular legal principle.
The Ranger tells Tonto to follow the bad guys while he meets with the nice old man. Typical division of labour. The Ranger eventually gets Brady to talk by threatening to tell the Sheriff what he’s seen. Tonto eventually loses the trail. The Ranger fills in the local sheriff, and they set a plan to get Clyde to lead them to the hideout. Tonto once again poses as a criminal offering to spring Clyde, but he refuses the offer.
The sheriff puts on a play of gathering a posse, and tells Clyde that they’ve found the hideout and are going to rescue the girl. Panicked, he now agrees to escape with Tonto and the Ranger’s help. At the hideout, Ma threatens the judge’s daughter, who makes a pretty feeble attempt to escape. One of the Henshaws sees Clyde riding up and goes to warn Ma. She recognizes Tonto and smells something suspicious.
Ma Henshaw is serving up looks
Ma doesn’t believe the story and points Clyde’s gun at the Ranger and Tonto. But the Ranger has taken the bullets out and is able to punch out all of the brothers. He and Tonto ride off before the trial, which seems premature considering what’s just happened, but then again I’m not a masked hero.
What I thought: This is the final episode of the first season of The Lone Ranger, but it isn’t a “season finale” in the contemporary sense. For one thing, since the series is almost entirely episodic, there isn’t a big storyline to resolve or an arch-villain to defeat. This isn’t even a particularly high-stakes or exciting one-off storyline. The second season also started a week later, in the same time slot, so this marks less of a farewell-for-now and more of an administrative marker between episode orders.
Still, with a full year of episodes under our belt it’s worth stopping to evaluate The Lone Ranger. I actually enjoyed the first few episodes quite a bit, with the Ranger’s origin story having forward momentum and the filmed series being quite a contrast from the amateur-ish Kinescopes I had been watching up until then.
Once the show settled into its more episodic mode I lost interest, and found the show hard to write about, to the point where I started doing those big omnibus posts. (Which I might not do anymore, as the schedule of available-in-full shows starts to grow.) This may be more an issue with me than with the show — I’m very much of the generation that grew up watching shows that were at least semi-serialized, so I will have to adjust my expectations for at least the next 30 years or so.
Anyway, this episode is mostly the standard Lone Ranger fare, but there are some interesting points. One is Ma Henshaw, the outlaw matriarch who proves to be more of a threat to the Ranger and Tonto than any of her doltish sons. If you squint, you could see this character as an ancestor of Margo Martindale’s Mags Bennett and other tough Western women, and I wish Ma had been developed a little more. There’s also increasingly a trend of masculine or otherwise path-breaking women in The Lone Ranger which I find interesting.
The sheriff is about as effective as his moustache.
The actual plot of this episode again illustrates the paradox of American crime-and-punishment stories, that the law is simultaneously the all-encompassing principle that one must serve and a nest of technicalities that criminals hide behind — here the “double jeopardy” law that the criminals seek to exploit. This is the role of the Ranger and other vigilantes, to ensure the law punishes and does not protect those who are already known to be guilty. It seems, increasingly, that we are only happy with the law when it punishes.
So, The Lone Ranger is dead, and long live The Lone Ranger. I’m not sure what I will say about the next 26 episodes, but I will try. Who knows, maybe in season 2 it becomes a gritty crime drama, or a space opera. One can always hope.
Coming up next: We get back to the ring, with some more wrestling from Chicago.
What I watched: Five episodes 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. These episodes are grouped together to avoid too much repetition. They aired weekly on Thursday nights in August 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm.
“The Wrong Man” (August 3, 1950, dir. George B. Seitz, writ. Eve Greene, guests Don Beddoe, Glen Vernon, Nan Leslie, Richard Crane)
A man named Meredith (snicker snicker, Crane) is arrested at dawn for the murder of the local judge. The Lone Ranger and Tonto overhear about the case from two tousel-headed kids. The Ranger gives a speech about the justice system and the importance of due process, then rides off to investigate.
He talks to Meredith as well as the local sheriffs, stressing the importance of getting the right man. Through an expository conversation, we get an idea of the real plot: Jess Latham (Beddoe) arranged for Meredith to be framed to protect his son Ted (Vernon). The judge gets a hanging party together, but the Ranger wants to get an impartial judge from Booneville.The daughter of the killed man, Alicia (Leslie, wearing a pretty sweet dress) pleads on his behalf to give Meredith a fair trial. The Ranger sends Tonto on the journey to Booneville while he stays behind and “keeps an eye out.”
There’s also this weirdly impressionistic shot of a hangman’s noose knocking at the door.
The Ranger finds the pimply-looking Ted sneaking around, and confronts him about what he’s overheard. He holds Ted at gunpoint and gets a confession that he killed the judge because he wouldn’t let him marry his daughter. In the morning, however, he recants his confession and says that it was forced out of him — which, to be fair, it kind of was.
The sheriff takes Ted away, and Dad admits to the wrongdoing, and also to kidnapping Tonto to stop him from reaching Booneville. Poor Tonto: he’s even being captured off screen these days. Dad jumps the Ranger while he’s untying Tonto, but he gets knocked out pretty shortly. Meredith is released into the arms of Alicia and the heroic duo make their typical quick exit.
The script here, by Eva Greene, is one of the better we’ve seen this season on The Lone Ranger, with all of the characters having understandable motivations and the plot moving quickly. Murderer Ted even comes across as pitiable, if not sympathetic — less of a mustache-twirling schemer and more of a kid in over his head. As in previous episodes, there’s a willingness to portray a fallible criminal justice system, but it only goes so far: ultimately, with the right man in charge, justice can be served.
“The Beeler Gang” (Aug. 10, 1950, dir. Seitz, writ. Greene, guests Robert Rockwell, Beverly Campbell, Hugh Prosser, William Haade)
A man dumps a package in the rocks, and a nearby Tonto investigates. It’s a child’s slipper, with a ransom note intended for a nearby sheriff in it. Bandits have taken his son and want $10, 000 and for him to resign. Man, these defund police protesters are really escalating things. The sheriff, Lawson (Rockwell) has a cool undercut, a square jaw and a distraught wife (Campbell). The Ranger and Tonto show up, and after some initial mistrust they recognize the silver bullet and accept the Ranger’s help.
The bandits are also getting together. The leader, Stan Beeler (Prosser), says that he’s tired of being a small-time crook and wants to be a big man by taking over the town. The problem is that the kid is sick, and none of the outlaws have cough medicine. When one of them called Joe (Haade) goes to get it, he’s noticed by the Ranger, who is wearing one of his absurd disguises, this time as a tea-sipping dandy. Honestly, I’d rather see that guy fight crime.
The sheriff comes in and makes a show of throwing out the Ranger, under the pretense that he’s a doctor who works for outlaws. The bandit leads him to their hideout, with Tonto following behind. The Ranger sees the snotty kid and immediately lets him in on the plan to break him free (if he doesn’t die of TB before then.) There’s some dissension between the bad guys, with some of them uncomfortable with the whole kidnapping thing.
The main bad guy goes to bed, while his henchman Joe overhears Tonto talking to the sheriff and his wife and gets wind of the plan. With everyone else asleep, the Ranger spirits the kid away, but Joe wakes the rest of the gang up. Silver takes the kid away while the Ranger fends the men off with a gun. With the day saved, the kid says he wants to be a doctor, which I imagine he thinks involves a lot of gunplay.
The sick-kid element gives this one an added bit of tension, but otherwise this is a fairly standard installment. It is interesting to see the large role that the Ranger’s disguise takes up in the plot. It’s almost as though the whole mask thing is holding him back.
“The Star Witness” (August 17, 1950, dir. Seitz, writ. Curtis Kenyon, guests Ray Bennett, Gene Evans, Michael Chapin)
The Lone Ranger doing what he loves most: throttling kids
The Ranger and Tonto come to a town to meet up with a Sheriff Hollister that they allegedly helped a few years ago. Meanwhile, three prospectors have just come across a reserve of gold. Two of them, Beutel (Bennet) and Gorman (Evans) kill the third one, an affable old man, and kick his body down a cliff. A young boy, Johnnie (Chapin) sees the whole thing. The kid runs to his parents and tells them about it, but they’re skeptical.
Our heroes find the body and move it, thus making the little kid look like a liar when he tries to show it to the dad. Great job, heroes. The Ranger meets up with Hollister, after briefly getting in some gunplay with his deputy, and tells him about the corpse. They then catch the kid escaping his dad’s house to see the sheriff. Johnny is understandably alarmed by two armed men, one of them masked, accosting him, but he eventually tells them his story.
The Ranger and the sheriff come up with a plot to use the eyewitness testimony to set a trap for the killers. This involves saying that Tonto saw the murder to use him as bait. Poor Tonto. This fact is name-dropped in front of the killers at the saloon, which they can’t tell apart from the typical exposition. Unfortunately, Johnny’s dad also hears the story, and muses about hearing his son’s story in front of the outlaws. They decide to walk into the trap to see if Tonto recognizes them.
The goons go to Tonto’s room, supposedly looking for a “Mr. Brown”, and he doesn’t recognize them. Man, there’s a lot to unpack there. The bad guys try to murder Johnny while some weirdly upbeat classical music plays. He hides under the bed, but they find him. Before they can commit child murder the Lone Ranger shows up to punch them out. The kid’s mom also bludgeons one of them, which is a fun touch. The kid swears that he’ll wear a mask too when he grows up, which I assume means he has a bright future as an early luchador.
This episode has a very slow opening segment. We spend a surprising amount of time with the prospectors before one of them gets killed off, and then a lot of time with the kid running around narrating what he’s seen. There’s a rather startling amount of child endangerment in the end, but for the most part this is a fairly standard kid’s wish-fulfillment fantasy.
“The Black Widow” (August 24, 1950), dir. Seitz, writ. Joe Richardson, guests John Alvin, George Pembroke)
Tonto brings the Ranger a newspaper about the release of a man wanted for the worst crime of all: robbing the government. The Ranger is furious about this and decides to track the man down. Meanwhile ,we see a stagecoach being robbed with a man and a veiled woman inside it. They shoot the driver, and the Ranger and Tonto emerge just in time to catch the runaway coach.
We get a glimpse of the unveiled face, and I suppose we’re to gather that it’s a man. The Ranger wides off to look for the other passenger, but instead finds a wacky prospector describing himself as a professor, Doc Hagen (Pembroke) collecting spiders. The Ranger cuts open the prof’s feed bag so that he’ll leave a trail. The professor promptly goes back to meet up with the goons, only to find that they kidnapped the wrong guy from the stage.
The Ranger then goes to talk to a wacky Mexican innkeeper and visit Mrs. Nelson. This time the Ranger sees through her disguise, and gets Nelson to reveal that he is a deputy trying to keep track of the robber, Higgins. They agree to team up, but it turns out that Nelson is actually Silky Carter (Alvin) in league with the crooks and stole the sheriff’s star from the man who was killed in the robbery. This plot is officially too complicated for me, especially because I can only make out some of the dialogue on these files.
Silver has pretty elaborate dressage.
Fortunately, Tonto sees the other two goons digging a grave, and finds the real deputy’s jacket. This alerts the Ranger to the fact that he’s being tricked. He walks into their trap anyway. Nelson makes the Ranger dig up the stolen money, then double-crosses (or triple-crosses?) his compatriats. The Ranger tells Silkie the sheriffs are on their way, and Tonto jumps off a rock to take him out. Seems like Tonto does most of the work in this one.
This episode features one of the more elaborate plots in The Lone Ranger, with multiple factions and a triple-crossing cross-dresser who looks a little like Walton Goggins. I’m not sure it actually improves the show, but it certainly keeps things interesting. I would actually have liked to see some of the elements, like the criminal professor, fleshed out a little more.
“The Whimsical Bandit” (August 31, 1950, dir. John H. Morse, writ. David Lang, guests Nestor Paiva, Sheila Ryan)
Hey, it’s a Dan Reid episode! This time the youngster finds a dead body near a telegraph pole and calls in his masked uncle. The man is apparently part of the excellently-named Juan Bronco’s gang, and the Ranger deduces that the gang is looking to rob a stagecoach. He could tell because this was an episode of The Lone Ranger. We meet Juan (Paiva), a sombrero-wearing Mexican who muses about women while threatening his lackies. How whimsical.
The Bronco gang holds up the stage and shoots the driver. He flirts with the passenger, a stuck-up woman in a bonnet named Maude (Ryan). He gives her his jewel-encrusted ring in return. The Ranger and posse arrive a minute too late and give chase. Triumphal music plays as they catch up with… the stage that was robbed. The woman shows him the ring and offers to pay them to get her money back. The Ranger immediately tells Dan to go home and rides towards Bronco’s hideout. Tonto’s just glad there’s someone below him in the hierarchy now.
In the camp, Bronco eats chicken and tries to get his men to cheer up. He sees Dan riding Victor, a kind of mini-Silver, and immediately wants it. Dan refuses to give up the horse at gunpoint, so Bronco wrestles him off. The Ranger and Tonto find the trail and a nearby hidden trail. He sends Tonto, now once again the low man, back to town. The Ranger gives one of the goons Juan’s ring and gets him to bring him to the cabin.
A king.
The Ranger acts like he’s going to join Bronco’s gang, and then insults his ability to handle a whip becuase of his weak wrist. Yeah, that has some overtones. After a little bit of this ruse, he punches Bronco out. Tonto brings in the posse. Dan enthusiastically says “what a fight!”
This is an episode that is owned by its villain, the seducing and pontificating Juan Bronco. Juan is a very stereotypical character, but also kind of rules. Lone Ranger villains are usually dour insurance fraudsters or the like, so someone who seems to actually be having fun really stands out. Paiva, a prolific actor who we’ll likely see again a lot, does a great job making all of these affectations seem spontaneous and charismatic.
What I thought: We’re in the home stretch of the first season of The Lone Ranger, which sounds significant until you realize that the second season starts immediately afterwards. The only real through line in this episode was the role of children, who turn up in three of the five. We have the young “Star Witness”, a sickly hostage, and the return of the Lone Ranger’s nephew Dan Reid (who doesn’t really end up doing much.)
The obvious explanation for these characters is that they offer a form of wish-fulfillment for the viewer, allowing the young boys that made up most of The Lone Ranger‘s audience to imagine themselves in the story. I still find it curious that in this period most children’s entertainment starred adult characters, which is such a stark contrast to the genre today. Perhaps this is a preferrable to the current state of affairs, when many adults live purely through entertainment about children and teens, but it’s still a little jarring.
And let the concept of identification is never simple. The children and teens in this story are perpetually in danger, subject to the whims of adults around them, and ultimately needing to be rescued by a man in a mask — an abstract avatar of authority. And yet perhaps this too is a fantasy, birthed from the quiet sado-masochism of childhood games — being tied up, or stuck under the bed, and rescued by a square-jawed man.
Or perhaps the Lone Ranger, with his literally blank face, is the fantasy figure that young viewers projected on. He is an adult, but one without responsibilities or routine. In rescuing other children, perhaps this is a fantasy of being able to protect brothers and friends, or of simply possessing a mastery over the world.
It is perhaps foolish to psychologize too much here about some abstract male viewer. But The Lone Ranger, and many other masked heroes, would be a staple of childhood for a reason — and now a staple of adulthood. Somewhere between sexual and political fantasy lives the appeal of the masked man who pursues justice, everyone and no one.
Coming up next: We’re right back to our friend Jackie on Cavalcade of Stars.
What I watched: Four episodes 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. These episodes are grouped together to avoid too much repetition. They aired weekly on Thursday nights in July 1950 on ABC at 7:30 pm.
My previous source of episodes was taken down from YouTube, but some kind soul has uploaded them to various torrent website, so they are accessible if you don’t mind sailing the high seas. Versions of the episodes with some alterations to avoid copyright detection have also been uploaded to YouTube.
“Outlaw of the Plains” (July 6, 1950, dir. George B. Seitz, writ. David Lang., guest Jack Lee)
The Lone Ranger and Tonto are wandering around, digging up rocks when they run into a couple of old-ish guys, one of them wounded. They’ve apparently just been robbed by another man in the mask, making them naturally suspicious of the Ranger. Eventually they smooth things over and the heroic duo set out to track down the outlaws. Some expository dialogue shows that the robbers are the goons of an evil sheriff named Shattuck (Lee), who is upset that they didn’t wait for the cover of night.
Tonto talks to Shattuck, who is extremely laid back and suspicious of the term “kemosabe.” He is immediately my favourite Lone Ranger character. The old ranchers of the town are upset about having their cattle stolen recently, but Shattuck dissuades them from forming a posse, advising them to wait until morning. However, his actual plan is to head out that night with the Ranger and Tonto, leaving the dead weight behind.
Honest Abe is always looking down.
They head out to Stone Mountain, where Shattuck says the cattle have been disappearing to. (Are… are they in Georgia?) He then rides ahead and readies his goons to ambush the Ranger and Tonto. But the heroes get the upper hand with some well-timed punches. Tonto rides back for help, and of course gets Shattuck again.
Tonto brings back the bad sheriff, where they find the Ranger tied up with the remaining two men looking over him. This causes Shattuck to reveal his evil nature, but it’s a set-up — the Ranger actually has the other two men captured. What’s more, the old cattlemen are waiting to overhear the conversation. So the whole cast is basically hiding under a floorboard somewhere. Shattuck tries to escape, giving the Ranger an excuse to punch him out.
I’m not going to talk about this episode much in the summary below, so I’ll just say here that it is okay, maybe a bit above the average Lone Ranger episode. Shattuck is a fun villain as long as he retains his cover of being a kind of laid-back, nonplussed sheriff. The idea of an evil masked man going around, getting confused with the Ranger, is also interesting, although dropped almost immediately.
In the opening scene, we see a white man killing a Native American by bludgeoning him in the back of the head (you know, for kids.) Tonto and the Ranger quickly find the body and start investigating. A convenient conversation between a military sergeant named Pala (Bradford) and a local roughneck named Boles (Kennedy) let us know the bad guys’ scheme quicker than usual: the duo are burying guns in Native territory, with the intent of provoking a war with the local tribe so they can acquire the land.
On the reservation, Chief White Eagle (Moody) is having his portrait painted by a young white lady, Toni Carver (Frazee). The other tribe members are suspicious, having “primitive superstitions” about being captured in pictures. The local General Stacey (Watkin) comes by to be chummy with White Eagle and berate the painter for not protecting herself from these savages. The Ranger and Tonto find and dig up the rifles. They decide to set it up so that White Eagle can find the guns and get credit, but remove the powder so they can’t be used.
There’s an element of racial caricature to Carver’s artwork.
The bad guys sneak poison into the chief’s afternoon meal, and shortly afterwards he starts clutching at his heart. Tonto arrives on the scene and quickly figures out what happened just as he dies. Boles holds Tonto for investigation (at least he doesn’t get knocked out this time), but he sends off his horse to send a message for the Ranger. He also tells the tribesman that capturing the chief’s image killed him, and they seize Carver.
The bad guys set out to kill Tonto, making it seem like he was trying to escape. But before they can do so, the Ranger arrive, and they duke it out. The Ranger squares off with Pala and Tonto with his deputy, so that everything is in order. After clobbering them, they return to the reservation where they consult the new chief, the dumb-seeming Red Moon (Stevens), and his now armed men. But the rifles were sabotaged earlier, which the Ranger says is because they were possessed by an evil spirit. We conclude with Red Moon sitting in a jail cell with the white villains, and the Ranger and Tonto heading out into the sunset. What happens to the Natives? Eh, I’m sure they’re fine.
“Trouble for Tonto” (July 20, 1950, writ. Fran Striker, dir. John H. Morse, guests Robert Arthur, Lyle Talbot, Gene Roth, Byron Foulger)
We open with a young white man being held hostage by an Indian. Whitey begs for a drink of water, then immediately grabs the canteen and smashes it over the Native guy’s head. That’s how it goes. They scuffle, and the white guy ends up shooting and killing the Indian, with the Ranger and Tonto watching. The kid, Terry (Arthur), tells the story of being forcibly inducted into the Fargo Gang by Thad (Foulger), an employee of his banker father, and his Indian goon Black Eagle.
The family home conjures up suburban normalcy, to the point of anachronism.
The Ranger decides to use this as an opportunity to get enough evidence to put an end to Fargo. (Must be one of those Hawley haters.) He swaps out Black Eagle for Tonto, allowing Terry and Tonto to gather evidence. The Ranger drops in on Terry’s father Wyne (Talbot) and tells him about the plan. They start putting together a posse to set an ambush.
Fargo (Roth) and Thad show up at Dad’s house to demand a ransom, with Thad still playing innocent. Fargo looks like he’s about to open up a used car dealership. Back at his base, Fargo realizes that Tonto is an impostor because Black Eagle’s good luck charm doesn’t fit him, and slaps him around some. Tonto maintains his stoicism. After Terry blurts out his name, Fargo realizes that Tonto is “nothing special except he’s the sidekick of a man I’ve been wanting to stop for a long time.” I think you know what my gloss on that is going to be.
Fargo comes back to the house to flush out the Lone Ranger, trying to take him in at gunpoint. He even pulls off his mask, although we don’t see it. He gets Wyne to agree to let him rob the bank, which will definitely work. But it turns out that the man they’ve taken in is actually Terry’s older brother Glenn, and the real Lone Ranger comes in with a makeshift mask to clobber everyone. The bad guys are all arrested off-screen, including Thad.
“Sheriff of Gunstock” (July 27, 1950, writ. Joe Richardson, dir. John H. Morse, guest. Walter Sande, John Doucette, Mira McKinney & Tom Irish)
What happened: We see a man being tied up while his house is set on fire. The Ranger senses, seemingly telepathically, that there’s trouble in Gunstock. The name might have been the first clue. We’re introduced to a middle-aged barkeep Mrs. Miggs (McKinney) who’s forced to pay protection money to stay in business, smooth-voiced local crook Hanford (Doucette, charming as always) who is running the racket, the sheriff Jim Bennett (Sande) trying to nail him despite a lack of evidence, and the sheriff’s son Jack (Irish), who is studying to be a judge but really wants to be a tough guy. It’s all a bit of a plot rush.
The Ranger and Tonto arrive, and they’re apparently familiar with the sheriff and the town from an incident several years ago. (The show hasn’t been on that long, but sometimes it feels like that to me.) Jim denies that there’s any trouble and says that Jack is back at law school, but the Ranger sees through him. This is cause for the Ranger to indulge his love of dress-up and break out the old-timer disguise again, taking up as a boarder and floor-sweeper at the inn.
The master of disguise, at it again.
The bad guys catch the Ranger eavesdropping and rough him up, but Mrs. Mead’s salon, but she comes to his defense. He’s found out about the racket, and confronts Jim, accusing him of working for Hanford. After a brief stand-off, it turns out that Hanford is holding Jack hostage. They notice a few extra letters in the ransom letter, written by Jack, and we have a puzzle afoot.
The Ranger gets Mrs. Mead to look through her address book and finds the initials of Rod Turner. Tonto goes off to give a message to Hanford, supposedly from Rod to see him right away. Hanford is suspicious and takes Tonto with him at gunpoint. The Ranger flushes them out with one of their own explosive cans and a tripwire, then beats up all five guys in the gang. (They must have had some extra cast budget for this episode.) The Ranger bids farewell to all of the guest stars and rides off into the sunset.
What I thought: Every time The Lone Ranger has a plot dealing with Native Americans I take a deep breath. In “White Man’s Magic”, the series takes pains to try to draw a middle course between portraying Natives as the savage villains of early Westerns and portraying them as real human beings. Here we have the two sides of the Indigenous stereotype split into different characters: White Eagle and Tonto are the noble savages, full of passive dignity, while Red Moon and the rest of the tribe are the superstitious and aggressive barbarians who are easily manipulated by the white villain. The Ranger even engages in his own manipulation in the end, preying on the tribe’s primitive beliefs.
Neither role really has much agency. We are never invited to consider how the story unfolds from Tonto’s perspective. In multiple episodes now, we’ve seen Natives as the pawns of white villains. This was intentional by Trendle, in an attempt to move away from casting them as bad guys and reduce race hatred, and to an extent this is respectable. But there’s an obvious limit to how far the show is willing to go with this, and I fear that we’re going to keep butting up against this wall over and over again.
The dichotomy between good and bad Indians is also present in “Trouble for Tonto”, where the heroic sidekick and the nonspeaking goon Black Eagle are effectively interchangeable. Fargo, the villain, is meant to be prejudiced as part of his villainy, repeatedly referring to Tonto as “redskin” (although it would take another 70 years for a certain football team to admit that this term is derogatory.) But the episode’s narrative also suggests a low opinion of Indigenous people. When appealing to Black Eagle for water, Terry asks “Come on, you’re human, aren’t you?” From the lack of concern for his death a few minutes later, it would seem that The Lone Ranger‘s answer is that he really isn’t.
The other theme which seems to run through these two episodes is the reliability of the law as a means of justice. We have a crooked sheriff in “Outlaw of the Plains”, which is proving to be a surprisingly common trope in a series committed to the rule of law. Perhaps as compensation, there’s a very procedural bent to the script: the Ranger makes sure to get court-appropriate evidence, with everything witnessed and reinforced in triplicate, rather than his usual punch-first approach. When justice is threatened, the only recourse is to double down on legalism.
“Sheriff of Gunstock” also features a sheriff who fails to prosecute evil — in this case, not because of his own corruption, but because of his worry for his son. He is almost immediately let off the hook for this, falling under the good side of the Ranger’s strict moral divide, but his failure is still one that must be remedied. (It’s also of note that we once again have Tonto pretending to be a bad guy.) We again see the doubling-down on legalism — the sheriff’s son is even studying for law school, an aspiration which everyone in the cast seems to stress is noble.
This also resonates differently in light of the continued protests against police violence inflicted upon people of colour. The violence of the state is plainly present in this episode: the villainous sheriff plans to shoot Tonto and say that he was trying to escape jail, echoing the common excuse that a shooting victim was resisting arrest. But this is skipped over quickly, so that we can get back to the more important storyline about land ownership and white heroism.
“Trouble for Tonto” also stresses the innocence of a white child who shoot and kills an Indian. Terry experiences immediate regret, but the killing is quickly forgotten, a device used to set up the impostor plotline. I am reminded, involuntarily, of Kyle Rittenhouse or all the other white people whose innocence is presumed by an otherwise punitive society because the people they killed were less human than them. The scene, with a scuffle over a gun that accidentally goes off, is straight out of an official story.
Anyway, these episodes are fine. For the most part, the script forgoes the typical mystery structure: we know immediately who the bad guys are and what they’re up to. Instead, we have almost a heist structure: we have some idea of the Ranger’s plan, something goes wrong, but in the end he pulls it off. But these days it gets harder and harder for me to watch conventional crime-and-punishment stories. Thankfully there are only seventy more years of them to go in this project!
Coming up next: Gene Autry introduces us to a different sort of cowboy.
What I watched: Five episodes of The Lone Ranger, a kid-oriented Western created by George W. Trendle. All episodes starred Clayton Moore as the Ranger and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, and aired on ABC at 7:30 on Thursday nights. The YouTube channel that I was getting most of the episodes from has been taken down, but I’ve found another one with most of them up, so that’s… good.
The episode begins on an unusually morose note, with old Tug Barker about to be executed at San Pablo prison before it is closed. He gives his young bunkmate Danny a bird to deliver to his daughter. When Danny collapses from the heat, the Ranger and Tonto rescue him, and learn about the injustice that lead to the old man’s execution. We are also introduced to this episode’s bad guys, the real murderer Gil and a crooked lawyer Hague.
Danny delivers the cage to Tug’s daughter Nora, but he’s confronted by Gil, who turns out to also be Nora’s suitor. Small world. Tonto does his “wild Indian act” to distract them by wrecking shit. There’s a dissertation to be written about that scene. He goes to prison, and the bad guys interrogate him about an old cache of gold underneath the now-closed prison. Tug’s bird cage also contains a letter saying that he discovered a cache of gold, left by Spanish settlers, underneath San Pablo.
People get stuck in dark basements and such a lot in this show.
Hague and Gil meet, and start discussing their plan. The Ranger and Tonto get the drop on them, but let them go, doing one of their signature schemes. They follow the baddies to the prison, and Gil starts getting spooked by the memory of Tug. Danny and Nora re also there, and have found the gold, but Hague and Gil pull the ladder up on them and trap them. But they too are being watched by the Ranger and Tonto, who punch them out. Thus, their needlessly circuitous plan is complete, and Nora and Danny take the gold home.
Of note in this episode is Tonto consciously invoking a racial stereotype by doing his “wild Indian” act. In a different context, this could come off as a self-reflexive construct about the performative nature of race. But this is The Lone Ranger, so beneath the wild Indian act is another racial type, the subservient sidekick who has no problem being tossed in jail to cause a momentary distraction. This is perhaps emblematic of The Lone Ranger‘s treatment of race: striving to reject the racial stereotypes of cruder Western, but still unable to picture Indigenous people as complete humans.
“Damsels in Distress” (June 8, 1950, writ. Tom Seller, feat. John Banner, Tom Tyler, Phil Tead, Peggy McIntire, Gloria Winters)
We open with a group of nebulous Europeans, lead by a man named Garth, trying to buy a newly-designed rifle off the inventor Dexter. He says no, as there are too many wars in Europe. He’s really concerned about the revolutions of 1848, I guess. Dexter breaks his rifle and runs away, but gets an off-screen thrown knife in the back for his trouble. The Ranger and Tonto come along and take care of him before he passes. It turns out that Garth is also wanted as a foreign agent.
The blueprints for the gun are now in the hands of Dexter’s two daughters and their governess. Garth and von Baden see them leaving the house, then ransack the place, intimidating their servant, and learn that the women have left with them. The Ranger decides to use this as an excuse to disguise himself as an old soldier. He and von Baden both hop into a stagecoach with the women. This is the worst ripoff of Stagecoach I’ve ever seen.
I got this image from a German dub uploaded on Dailymotion. I wonder if the moral is different in this version.
Garth then acts as a robber, trying to steal from the stage, while von Baden fights him off. This ruse fools the women, who are all credulous enough to tell him where they’ve hidden the drawing and hand them over to them, except for the youngest girl, who apparently has two brain cells to rub together. von Baden then pulls a gun on them, but the Ranger gets the jump on him with the old “there’s a knife on the floor” trick. Garth tosses him out, but he and Tonto chase down the evil foreigner and kick his ass. Presumably they sell the rifle patent and make a lot of guns to be used in good old-fashioned American wars.
This episode has brief glimpses of the more adult Westerns that would come to dominate prime time later in the decade. Here we have a justice system that actually kills an innocent man, and the geopolitics of American involvement in Europe interjected into the Old West. The villain is a European, heavily implied to be German, and he is determined to involve the innocent Americans in European wars. The need to stop a dangerous weapon from falling into the wrong hands also has particular resonance in a Cold War environment. It’s not much, and it’s mostly just a backdrop to some Western shenanigans, but it’s something.
The role of Spanish gold in this story, and many others, is also interesting to me. The gold is, of course, remnants of the original conquest of the New World, one that America honours in its very name. In addition to being a convenient plot device, the Americans obtaining the gold establishes them as the legitimate heirs of those early colonization efforts, while being conveniently innocent of any of the bloodshed that was necessary to acquirer these goals.
The Ranger and Tonto stumble upon yet another overturned stagecoach, apparently attacked by “Indians” and then get shot at by a teen. Because this is still the first act, they decide to be friends with the guy trying to kill them. It turns out that the kid, Jim (Jones), ran away from his mom in St. Louis to go join his dad (Dunn) in the West.
The head of the local cattle ranchers, and obvious villain, Tom Gorham (Harrison) comes by. He’s the titular “man without a gun”, but he seems excited to round up a posse and go after the Indians. The Lone Ranger, having been in this show before, thinks that the attack is suspicious and the Indians aren’t the real bad guy. Gorham’s plan is to start a war and somehow get the rights to a gold mine under chieftan Red Hawk’s territory.
There’s a nice shot from the perspective of the unseen gunman.
The Ranger rides in to parlay with Red Hawk. He quickly realized that the attack was staged by the true villain: the white man. A bunch of Gorham’s men dressed as Indians attack Jim and his dad, and take the boy and Tonto hostage while being majorly problematic. Tom wants to use this as a pretext to attack the reservation. Gorham’s henchman reveals the plan to a tied-up Tonto and Jim, which they call him on. The goon is going to shoot them with a bow, but the Ranger comes in and punches everyone to save the day. Jim’s dad decides to let him stay on the ranch, and presumably be exposed to further violence.
“Man Without a Gun” is written and directed by unfamiliar names, as I believe this is Richardson and Morse’s first credit on the show. And yet, this is as archetypical as a Lone Ranger episode you’ll ever see, from the opening stage coach robbery to the expository dialogue between the secret villain and his minion to the heroes riding away immediately at the end. It was still only the first season, but with almost two decades of stories in the broader franchise, The Lone Ranger was at this point a vehicle pretty much anyone could drive.
We open with a banker foreclosing on the property of a young man named Morrison (Hanson) who happens to be sheriff. Those damn sub-prime mortgages. This is apparently on orders from a bad guy named Conent (Blake), who killed the previous sale. He asks for the mortgage to be extended for one week so that he can call in the Lone Ranger to settle the problem. This must be where he turns into the “Loan Arranger” guy I see on TV. Conent, a snazzily-dressed fellow holding a cigar, tries to bribe Morrison, but wouldn’t you know it, he’s an upstanding citizen.
Conent takes a more direct approach, kidnapping Morrison and making him leave a note suggesting he’s taken the money and skipped town. The bad guys have sent money to his creditors and everything The Ranger and Tonto arrive to find this, and Morrison’s slightly loopy wife. They’re still convinced that the sheriff is a good guy, given the Ranger’s infallible eye for character.
The wife has got style.
Conent has Morrison has tied up at his hide-out. Morrison says he has a friend rounding up information about a previously unmentioned murder. Conent’s goon goes out and get ambushed by the Ranger and Tonto, giving up the location his hide-out. The Ranger gets the drop on the bad guy, but he presses a switch that opens up a secret passage with a goon behind it. This seems needlessly elaborate. But the Ranger has his own hidden goon (Tonto) and they easily subdue the baddies. So Morrison is safe, with his debts paid off too. I wish I could be in a Lone Ranger episode.
This is probably one of the more elaborate plans that a Lone Ranger villain hatches. Again land, and the possession of it, is central to the conflict. The series puts great stock in property and the rule of law, but is also constantly afraid of this rule of law being undermined. The solution to this, it posits, is a second violent factor outside of the scope of the law, but this time benevolent.
We open with the familiar sight of a man on death row, scheduled to hang in the morning, but this time he’s actually a bad guy. He’s Clay Derpy (not the actual spelling, but that’s what I heard, so I’m sticking with it), and he’s counting on his still-at-large brother to bust him out. His brother Stark (Jolley) is out robbing stagecoaches, the other Lone Ranger episode opening. The stage contains two of the governor’s female relatives (Neumann and England), revealed through some awful expository dialogue. Fortunately the Ranger and Tonto are on the scene to chase them off.
Scott’s idea is to follow the titular “eye for an eye” proverb by capturing the governor’s family. They’re a sensible younger woman and a stuffy, foolish older woman. The goons have heard about the Ranger and are scared of him. The girls and our heroes dress in culturally insensitive Mexican costumes (9:00) The goons set a blockade but the old woman gets them out of trouble with some Spanish.
When you say you don’t want any tacos.
Eventually the bad guys get wise to the plan by browbeating the friendly Mexican who helped the heroes disguise themselves (the Ranger saying “yo quiero Taco Bell” probably didn’t help.) They kidnap the girls and leave the Ranger and Tonto in a ditch. The good guys find Derpy’s hideout. The women help out by literally pulling the rug out from under the villain, and the Ranger bludgeons him with a fireplace poker. The state’s ability to kill has been restored, and all is well in the world.
This is the second episode this month that features multiple women being placed in peril, who are neatly divided into spunky heroines and irritating old maids. For the show’s pubescent male audience, this could have been engaging, neatly parsing out their growing interest in girls from their annoyance with femininity. Of course, grown men often think of women and girls the same way.
Overall Thoughts: One thing that really stood out to me watching these episodes was the ease and frequency with which people in The Lone Ranger universe point guns at and shoot at each other. Frequently this threatening with gun violence is only an opening flirtation before quickly joining forces. Maybe there’s something phallic in this, or maybe it’s just American gun culture. Guns don’t seem to hurt people much in this universe anyway, so maybe it’s natural that people are easy on the trigger.
The same theme of gun ownership pops up in “Man Without a Gun”, where the eponymous villain’s apparent pacifism is the first sign that he is suspicious. Rather than the simple, straightforward aggression of the gun-owners, he is a schemer who exploits the power of others. Gorham’s unarmed nature is not particularly well developed, but his character almost seems to be a defense of the series’ play-violence: better a Ranger who shoots and punches, it suggests, than one who relies on others. (Again, you could also see a geopolitical reference to the Soviet Union’s professions of non-involvement while its surrogate armies battled the US across the world.)
Perhaps this was just a way of adding a little bit of action into the talkier sections of the episodes. But it also reflects the broader conception of guns in American culture, particularly in the South, as a harmless and almost playful component of robust masculinity. It is this conception that causes so much furor in American discussions about gun violence, with the fetishistic character of the gun as a symbol of rural masculinity and self-determination making it either sacred or reviled. After all, who needs to fear when you have the Lone Ranger, the archetypical “good guy with a gun”, right around the corner?
Also, I need a better title for the “overall thoughts” section. Some kind of TV reference…
Coming up next: Howdy Doody celebrates the Fourth of July, America’s version of Canada Day.
The Eternal Couch Potato 