The Legend of the Lone Ranger [DVD]

The early Eighties saw a slew of Westerns greenlit by studios, many hoping to ride on the coat-tails of the anticipated success of Heaven's Gate (who knew it would become a by-word for box-office disaster?) - The Long Riders, Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Barbarosa and this attempt by Lew Grade's ITC to start a new screen franchise. On paper it wasn't without promise. Legendary cinematographer William A. Fraker had directed the excellent Lee Marvin-Jack Palance Western Monte Walsh, while co-writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts had written a number of James Cagney films (including the classic White Heat) and William Roberts had written the wonderful comic Western The Sheepman as well as contributing to The Magnificent Seven. It even boasted a John Barry score.

The result was a massive and critically reviled box-office disaster in its day - it ran a single week in a handful of UK cinemas - not least because of one of the greatest PR fiascos in film history when the producers outraged America by taking out a court order to stop original Lone Ranger star Clayton Moore from wearing his mask at charity events. The stink was so great that even the same producers' Raise the Titanic grossed more. So, a quarter century on, is this little-seen, never revived Western really that bad?

Not exactly: it's just not very good, slow and pedestrian for much of its running time. It takes nearly an hour of drawn-out backstory for John Reid to don his mask and become the Lone Ranger, and once he does, he doesn't exactly do much. Indeed, there's little action in the film - a stagecoach robbery at the beginning, a good canyon shootout in the middle and a lot of explosions at the end. Unfortunately, it doesn't find that much interesting to fill in the gaps with.

Part of this is down to the leads. Klinton Spilsbury is inoffensive but defiantly unmemorable as The Lone Ranger - I've got furniture with more personality - while Michael Horse's Tonto fares little better. Jason Robards phones in his performance as Ulysses S. Grant, the great Richard Farnsworth has nothing to do as Wild Bill Hickok and Juanin Clay's romantic interest is dropped no sooner than she is established. Only a restrained Christopher Lloyd makes an impression as the evil Butch Cavendish.

Today the film is more interesting for its very obvious influence on the plot of the so very much better The Mask of Zorro - as in Martin Campbell's film, the hero adopts a mask and a disguise to avenge the death of his brother at the hands of a disgraced officer who plans to turn his province into a small country. There's even a scene between the Lone Ranger, disguised as a priest, and his romantic interest in a church confessional, a la Zorro. But what's missing here is the panache: everything is workmanlike and uninvolving. Even John Barry's score, hampered by Merle Haggard's unfortunate title song and some persistent rhyming narration, seems to be just going through the motions when the film really needs the kind of zest an Elmer Bernstein could give it to kick some life into it, while Lazlo Kovacs' cinematography seems equally underwhelmingly murky when it should be spectacular.

It's watchable and it's certainly not the war crime contemporary critics made it out to be, but it's still a missed opportunity.

On the plus side, though listed as 4:3 fullscreen, Prism's original UK DVD release is actually letterboxed in the full original 2.35:1 widescreen ratio. No extras, but the reasonable price and the decent widescreen transfer helps compensate. The DVD reissue from Network films, also 2.35:1 widescreen, at least includes the trailer and a stills gallery. The US NTSC DVD is fullframe.

Almost bad enough to be fascinating, this misconceived shambles of a movie remains defiantly inert. Presumably conceived in the rush to get the next pulp/comic book hero onto the screen in the wake of "Superman the Movie", the film betrays many interesting elements and rarely rises to a canter, much less a triumphant gallop.

It's directed, insofar as it's directed at all, by William Fraker, whose reputation rests securely on his excellent cinematography for such westerns as "Rancho Deluxe" and "Tombstone", as well as his direction of the second-to-none classic "Monte Walsh". In short, this guy knows how to make a cowboy movie. But "The Legend of the Lone Ranger" shows every evidence of having been panic-strickenly post-produced to death as the realisation sank in that something had gone badly wrong. What we have here seems to be the remains of a longer movie. I've no idea if that longer movie would have been any better than the one finally issued, but it hardly makes sense to saw the ship in half in order to keep it from sinking.

A huge blunder was made early on, with the casting of Klinton Spillsbury as the eponymous masked man. He simply isn't there. Again, the producers were probably thinking that, hey, Christopher Reeve was an unknown and look how well Superman did. But Reeve had a modicum of talent and was perfectly cast to take advantage of that talent. Poor old hapless Spillsbury suffers from possibly the worst case of Orlando Bloom syndrome I've come across, in that the eye just wanders away from him and settles on details of decor and landscape, enjoying the vista of Monument Valley or the tilt of Richard Farnsworth's hat; it's impossible to focus on this guy.

But the failure of the film isn't solely his fault. The production feels embarrassed to be a Lone Ranger project, and is at its happiest when pretending that it's not. Jason Robards steals the show as a cynical President Ulysses S Grant who acts like he's wandered in from a better movie. There is something too in the idea of Butch Cavendish as some kind of 19th century Colonel Kurtz, trying to set up his own private nation. But, as good an actor as Christopher Lloyd is, the part really needed somebody like "Companeros"-era Jack Palance to truly lift it. Lloyd underplays the role (and when have you ever heard those four words used in that order before?) so the character remains a frustrating cypher, the only hint to what's really going on inside him being his Napoleon haircut.

John Barry's fine score earns the film an extra star it doesn't deserve on its own merits.

The early Eighties saw a slew of Westerns greenlit by studios, many hoping to ride on the coat-tails of the anticipated success of Heaven's Gate (who knew?) - The Long Riders, Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Barbarosa and this doomed attempt by Lew Grade's ITC to start a new screen franchise. On paper it wasn't without promise. Legendary cinematographer William A. Fraker had directed the excellent Lee Marvin-Jack Palance Western Monte Walsh, while co-writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts had written a number of James Cagney films (including the classic White Heat) and William Roberts had written the wonderful comic Western The Sheepman as well as contributing to The Magnificent Seven. It even boasted a John Barry score.

The result was a massive and critically reviled box-office disaster in its day, not least because of one of the greatest PR fiascos in film history when the producers outraged America by taking out a court order to stop original Lone Ranger star Clayton Moore from wearing his mask at charity events. (Just to add insult to injury, they cast Moore's one season replacement John Hart in a cameo.) The stink was so great that even the same producers' Raise the Titanic grossed more. So, a quarter century on, is this little-seen, never revived Western really that bad?

Not exactly: it's just not very good, slow and pedestrian for much of its running time. It takes nearly an hour of drawn-out backstory for John Reid to don his mask and become the Lone Ranger, and once he does, he doesn't exactly do much. Indeed, there's little action in the film - a stagecoach robbery at the beginning, a good canyon shootout in the middle and a lot of explosions at the end. Unfortunately, it doesn't find that much interesting to fill in the gaps with.

Part of this is down to the leads. Klinton Spilsbury is inoffensive but defiantly unmemorable as The Lone Ranger - I've got furniture with more personality - while Michael Horse's Tonto fares little better. Jason Robards phones in his performance as Ulysses S. Grant, the great Richard Farnsworth has nothing to do as Wild Bill Hickok and Juanin Clay's romantic interest is dropped no sooner than she is established. Only a restrained Christopher Lloyd makes an impression as the evil Butch Cavendish.

Today the film is more interesting for its very obvious influence on the plot of the so very much better The Mask of Zorro - as in Martin Campbell's film, the hero adopts a mask and a disguise to avenge the death of his brother at the hands of a disgraced officer who plans to turn his province into a small country. There's even a scene between the Lone Ranger, disguised as a priest, and his romantic interest in a church confessional, a la Zorro. But what's missing here is the panache: everything is workmanlike and uninvolving. Even John Barry's score, hampered by Merle Haggard's unfortunate title song and some persistent rhyming narration, seems to be just going through the motions when the film really needs the kind of zest an Elmer Bernstein could give it to kick some life into it, while Lazlo Kovacs' cinematography seems equally underwhelmingly murky when it should be spectacular.

It's watchable and it's certainly not the war crime contemporary critics made it out to be, but it's still a missed opportunity, and the US DVD from Lionsgate only adds insult to injury by cropping the Scope image to fullframe, so you're better off sticking with Network's UK PAL release in the original 2.35:1 ratio and includes the original trailer and stills gallery..