Gore Verbinski's new film The Lone Ranger, which opens here next week, has received a bit of a pasting from critics in the US. Plagued by production problems and eventually completed at a staggering cost of $225m (€169m), Verbinski's film has made barely half that amount since it opened in America almost a month ago.

With a bewildering storyline and a central character who no longer seems to be part of the popular zeitgeist, the movie has signally failed to connect with younger audiences. But Johnny Depp's portrayal of his faithful sidekick Tonto has also ruffled feathers, and has even been labelled retrograde and racist by some.

Depp's Tonto swans around with a dead bird on his head, mumbles in broken English and makes strange chants to the sky in a performance that seems at times like a redskin caricature and would not have looked out of place in 19th-century vaudeville.

One Native American website called Depp's characterisation a "rodeo clown Tonto", while another criticised it for giving the impression that "we are uneducated, irrelevant, non-contributors to society living in teepees out on the plains".

These criticisms seem excessive, however, and Depp, who suspects he may have Cherokee or Creek ancestry, clearly intended his performance to be an ironic commentary on the shameful way in which Native Americans have been portrayed on screen in the past.

And in this regard he certainly has a point.

From the earliest days of American cinema, the so-called 'Indians' have been a handy and convenient scapegoat. Indeed, when Hollywood first began making westerns, they helped reinforce some scurrilous myths about how the West had been won.

In the silent westerns of star directors like DW Griffith and Cecil B DeMille, the Native Americans were generally portrayed as swarming savages with a lust for blood.

They danced elaborately, around campfires if one was handy, and rode semi-naked into battle, waving spears and dropping like flies. Their costumes and behaviour were the inventions of screenwriters who'd grown up reading western potboilers, and these Hollywood Indians were almost never played by actual Native Americans.

While the real 'Indians' loitered on scrubland reservations the US government had duped them into settling on, directors like DW Griffith hired Mexicans and blacked-up Caucasians to play their bloodthirsty savages.

John Ford's 1924 film The Iron Horse is a good example of Hollywood's attitudes to Native Americans at this time. The film's hero was a square-jawed surveyor who's supervising the construction of the first intercontinental railroad, and the enemies of progress were the plains Indians, who snuck around at night slitting the throats of workers.

Indians would often appear in the films of John Ford, but over the years the director's attitude to Native Americans would profoundly change.

To be fair, not all early Hollywood films depicted Indians entirely negatively. In Cecil B DeMille's The Squaw Man, a good-natured English nobleman falls for a squaw in the Midwest and makes her his bride. But the Native American woman probably needed rescuing, and while other films mined the idea of the 'noble savage', Indians for the most part remained the bogeymen in the hills.

In classic 1930s and 1940s westerns, the presence of Indians was often denoted by thumping drums and scalps hanging from trees: no films mentioned the fact that early white settlers also used the barbaric practice of scalping, and may have started it.

Though he was sometimes befriended and occasionally acted as a scout, the Hollywood Indian was not to be trusted, and had murder in his heart. He needed a nemesis, and who better than George Armstrong Custer? The famous general was a central character in more than 30 films, and was generally portrayed as a dashing hero.

In Santa Fe Trail (1940), Ronald Reagan played him as an all-around good egg who helps Errol Flynn repel a dastardly Indian attack. And in They Died With Their Boots On (1941), Flynn himself got to play Custer as a selfless hero who sacrifices himself at Little Big Horn.

A sea change in the depiction of Indians happened slowly, and began in the 1950s. John Ford led the charge. In films like Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Ford had begun exploring the idea that white settlers and soldiers were often as bad as or worse then the Native Americans they demonised.

This notion found its fullest expression in Ford's masterpiece The Searchers, in which John Wayne played a Civil War veteran whose blind hatred of Indians poisons everything around him. But Ford would go even further in his last western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), a savage indictment of America's treatment of the Indians.

In the late 1960s, as the values of the counterculture took hold in Hollywood, a string of revisionist westerns totally rethought the story of the American west. Ralph Nelson's controversial 1970 western Soldier Blue was heavily criticised for its graphic violence, but American audiences were probably more offended by the fact that the film showed the US Cavalry in a most unflattering light. Nelson's film recreated the notorious Sand Creek Massacre, when an army militia attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho and killed up to 160 men, women and children.

Clint Eastwood's epic 1976 western The Outlaw Josey Wales continued the trend of depicting Native Americans as people rather than monsters. Eastwood played a hardened Confederate veteran who gathers a group of unlikely stragglers as he searches for a safe haven in the aftermath of the Civil War. Among his group are a Cherokee man and a young Navajo woman, and Eastwood's character earns the respect of a fearsome plains Indian chief called Ten Bears by confronting him in battle.

This sympathetic approach to the Native American plight reached its climax in Kevin Costner's multi-Oscar-winning 1990 western Dances with Wolves, in which Costner played a Cavalry Lieutenant who is befriended by Lakota (Sioux) Indians during a hard winter and ends up becoming converted to their cause.

Costner's film was hugely successful but looks a little over-sentimental in retrospect. And when I was lucky enough to visit a Lakota reservation in South Dakota some years back, I found that the Native Americans themselves had mixed feelings about this superficially pro-Indian film. They pointed out, for instance, that when Costner's character fell in love, it was with an adopted white woman rather than a Native American squaw.

Johnny Depp will have channelled all his complex history into his approach to Tonto, but will also have been influenced by the original Tonto from the 1950s Lone Ranger TV series.

On that show, Tonto was played – for once – by a real-life Indian, a Canadian Mohawk called Jay Silverheels. Silverheels's ethnicity was a source of pride for Native Americans, but his performance was not. His Tonto was servile and seemingly illiterate, and Silverheels made things worse by appearing in character on the Johnny Carson show and speaking in monosyllabic English.

And, in a way, the character of Tonto perfectly sums up America's ambivalent attitude to its original inhabitants.

pwhitington@independent.ie

Irish Independent