THE LONE RANGER TRIES TO APOLOGIZE TO TONTO
First on radio, later on television, the series The Lone Ranger depicted Tonto (Jay Silverheels) in a very subordinate role. Now brought to the screen by director Gore Verbinski, Tonto is not portrayed by a Native American but instead by Johnny Depp, with the Lone Ranger (played by Armie Hammer) a character of equal status. A prologue and epilogue take place in a San Francisco museum, with a statute of a very elderly Tonto coming to life before a young boy during 1933 (the year when the radio series began). The caption “The Noble Savage” sums up how the listening and viewing publics perceived Tonto until the series came to an end in 1957—as subordinate to the Lone Ranger. The main task of the film is to reverse the stereotype, to provide a caper in which the duo encounters injustice, and finally to defeat the evildoers.
Answering why the two unlikely heroes teamed up takes about an hour of film footage, when the two are identified as outcasts. As a boy, Tonto gave information about the location of a silver mine in exchange for a watch, whereupon a mining operation began, presumably defiling the Comanche homeland, so Tonto is exiled for his mistake. As for the Lone Ranger, he begins as John Reid, a recent law graduate, arriving during 1869 in Colby, Texas, to become deputized as an officer of the law, only to discover that the law which he is to uphold has been hijacked by Latham Cole (played by Tom Wilkinson), who has ambitions to control the transcontinental railroad, then under construction, by buying up stock in the company with the wealth of the silver mine, taken over by his brother, thereby marginalizing all the other investors and killing Comanches in the process.
But the film is mostly about action rather than morality, and there are historical inaccuracies: (1) The Golden Spike was driven in Utah, not Texas. (2) Silver, discovered in Nevada, was not on Comanche territory. (3) Although a treaty with the Comanches is presumably broken by Cole, in fact no such treaty violation occurred in 1869; the Treaty of Medicine Lodge of 1867, establishing the parameters for a reservation, is still honored. (4) The main slaughter of Comanches came later. They conducted a final raid for livestock into México in 1870 and in subsequent years so angered so Texans over their continuing pursuit of buffalo and attacks on American buffalo hunters that in 1875 an American general attacked and burned five Comanche villages, massacred women and children, and destroyed over 1,400 Comanche horses. With cholera and smallpox having reduced the starving population below 8,000, they agreed to settle on a reservation nine miles north of Lawton, Oklahoma, later that year.
The playing of the William Tell Overture during chase scenes may enable those who heard the radio program to recall their youth, when their imagination substituted for visual action images on the screen. The 2013 film, having reestablished the duo, mighty perhaps whet the appetite of older filmviewers for a sequel film or perhaps a new television series in which the duo can expose and vanquish evildoers. But younger filmviewers have to be equally excited, and projections after the initial weekend box office proceeds of only $50,000 are that the film ultimately will not defray the $250 million cost of the film. No sequel seems likely. MH