The Legend of the Lone Ranger

The mystery is how Fraker, a gifted cameraman who made a superb directing debut in Westerns with Monte Walsh, could produce such a clinker as this. Purporting to be a biography of John Reid, alias the Lone Ranger, it starts with an interminable account (in gooey soft focus) of how 11-year-old John saved young Tonto from a fate worse than death, found his own parents butchered by outlaws, and took to the tepee to swear a blood pact with his Indian buddy. His adult campaign to right all wrongs is, if anything, even more flabbily inept, saddled with flavourless performances and an off-screen narrator who elucidates an already painfully limpid plot like nanny explaining to a retarded child.