Post by Eddie Love on Feb 19, 2011 9:40:03 GMT -5
Well…what can you really say….
Released in 1981 to uniform critical and audience rejection, THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER, an attempt to “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear” and leverage boomer nostalgia for the pop culture icon and introduce the character to younger audiences anew, this film has resided in ignominy ever since. Maybe it’s not as horrible as its reputation, but those of us who love to root for underdogs and who sift through the trash heap behind the Cineplex of decade's passed looking for misunderstood gems – don’t get your hopes up.
The picture begins with a chaotic raid on some Western settlers during which a young boy is separated from his family and lives for a time with a native tribe. There the young white kid bonds with another boy named Tonto. Years later, John Reid, now grown, returns West to practice law. He joins up with his older brother, a Texas Ranger with odious attitudes about the federal government, and the two are members of a posse ambushed by a villain bent on starting his own Western nation and kidnapping the visiting President, Ulysses Grant (Jason Robards). Reunited with Tonto, who nurses him back to health after the attack, Reid rides out as a masked man seeking justice.
I guess I can recall watching some episodes of The Lone Ranger as a little kid, but I was always more into The Cisco Kid. (“Ohhhhh, Pancho!” “Ohhhhh, Cisco!”) And, is it just me, or is the whole notion of The Lone Ranger kind of dumb? Even in this film’s trivial, but essentially naturalistic, setting, the character comes off as comically one-dimensional. Why he feels the need to hide his face at all is never plausibly explained. Most of what we watch him doing is simply riding alone with Tonto across the plains – there’s never anyone else around, his need to wear a mask simply makes no sense. (Plus, being newly returned to the West, would anyone recognize him anyway?)
I wonder if there’s another instance of a performer who has exactly one credit of any kind on IMDB and it’s the lead, title role in a Hollywood feature and then…nothing, absolute crickets. That’s the fate of our masked man, one Klinton Spillsbury. It’s hard to judge his performance really, as the whole part's been re-dubbed by James Keach, so while he certainly seems wooden, whether that’s really his fault, is hard to say. (That’s the same fate, by the way, of Sam Jones’ Flash Gordon, but that performance manages to come together in a way that this one never does.) To be fair, Michael Horse as Tonto isn’t any great shakes either. They’re underserved by a pedestrian production that doesn’t introduce them to the viewer with much fanfare or ever give them any real point of view.
Maybe it’s me, but the very cinematic vocabulary of this picture just seems off. For instance, there’s a reasonably impressive stagecoach robbery in the beginning, but, perhaps I wasn’t paying attention, it seems like the editing got mixed up as to who in the coach was sitting where. Also, people in this picture seem always to be riding right-to-left across the screen, which is isn’t at all what we’re used to, and I found it off-putting.
There’s an initially arresting sequence where Reid first mounts the wild, white horse he’ll later dub Silver. However, this sequence goes on for-ev-er!!! When he finally dons his mask and rides out as The Lone Ranger – in the most immaculate Western outfit since Yul Brynner’s gleaming blue denim in CATLOW – he simply looks foolish and inauthentic, like someone who didn't make the cut for the Village People. (This may be why the filmmakers delayed his unveiling for so long and we frankly don’t really see all that much of it afterwards -- they rush to wrap the film up after that point.)
The Ranger has an odd and abortive romance with a prim woman in town who runs the local newspaper and it's insanely truncated. At one point he disguises himself as a padre and talks to her in a confessional – a scene straight out of THE MARK OF ZORRO. Then: nothing, we never see her again and are unsure why he ever approached her in the first place.
Okay, there are a couple good bits here. The ranger’s ambush is introduced with a stunning reveal of the bad guys assembled to take them out. Also, when the villains rob the stage and raid the town, they’re wearing these cool-looking burlap masks. Otherwise, the action is generally uninspired, but by no means awful. The real highlight of the film is Christopher Lloyd as the main villain. This is before he was “Christopher Lloyd”, he delivers none of his quavering, offbeat line readings, in fact, he’s kind of strikingly handsome and cuts an intense and compelling presence.
This picture also has a solid John Barry score. It’s good enough that when the Ranger’s timeworn theme music, The William Tell Overture kicks in at what are, I suppose, climactic moments – it’s a total distraction. Elsewhere, the soundtrack includes a running song commentary sung by Merle Haggard that relates details of the story that every third-grader paying minimal attention is pretty easily on top of. It’s really tacky and just plain godawful, this must be one of the principal reasons this movie was hated upon its release. And the main song, also sung by Haggard, is comically show-tuney.
Given this dreadful, hokey narration and kiddie-friendly opening, I guess this movie was aimed at pre-teens, which is what the character always was. As Westerns were pretty much a bygone genre by the time of this film’s release the kind of featherweight Western hero who rode a white horse (that he…um… talks to) was entirely a thing of the past. That said, it’s odd then how, not simply violent, but bloody the picture is. Where once the villains might have ckutched their bellies and fallen to the floor in histrionic agony, now they’re blown away leaving a red smear across a cantina wall. This disconnent between our true-blue protagonist and the post-Leone / Peckinpah visuals is something this tepid feature’s tone never get’s passed.
I watched this movie on the free, low-def movie channel Flix, in a widescreen format, but with the sepia-rich picture somewhat washed out looking. The disc of this that they have on Netflix, though, is truly awful, unwatchable, a hideous transfer and a full-screen pan-and-scan presentation.