13th
James Vance Column: The No-Frills Cowpoke
There was nothing fancy about Tim Holt. No trick horse, no bullwhip, no bull of any kind. He was just the quiet cowpoke everybody liked, a straightforward guy who literally shot from the hip … but in his amiable, unassuming way, he was right up there with the great B Western heroes of all time.
He was the son of silent action star Jack Holt, but despite the instant success he could’ve had as Jack, Jr. (his real name), he chose to make it on his own and as himself.
He’d already distinguished himself as a horseman and an athlete at military school before trying the acting game, and the artistic promise he displayed on stage landed him his first small film jobs in 1936. He moved up quickly, earning critical praise for a series of increasingly meaty roles, and became a star after only four years in the business.
With his curly hair and dimpled good looks, he had the makings of a bona fide teen idol; in addition to bobbysoxer appeal, he also projected a quiet strength, natural decency and enough real-life grit to tell John Ford off for bullying John Wayne on the set of “Stagecoach.” He could act, too, with a low-key sense of conviction that opened the doors to good roles in contemporary prestige dramas in between his efforts in the saddle.
By 1940, those qualities had convinced RKO that the 22-year-old actor had what it took to carry his own B Western series. Working with a variety of sidekicks, he proved the studio right in a string of 18 slickly produced little oaters before World War II put his rising career on hiatus.
By the war’s end he was no longer a babyfaced movie hero; he was the genuine article, with a new maturity gained in his time as a decorated bomber pilot that didn’t so much change him as make him a more clearly defined version of himself, more Tim Holt than ever.
With the fine performances he’d already given in mainstream efforts like “Back Street,” “Swiss Family Robinson,” “Hitler’s Children” and “The Magnificent Ambersons,” he could’ve stepped up to the big time, but except for a memorable turn in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the post-war Holt mostly gave the big time a wide berth.
RKO put him back in the saddle and cast Richard Martin as his sidekick, Mexican-Irish ladies’ man Chito Rafferty. It was an inspired teaming, for an actor of Holt’s caliber would have seemed wasted alongside the typical hayseed second banana types like Dub Taylor or Smiley Burnette.
Martin, however, was as handsome and valiant as any hero, and utterly believable as a friend and equal. He was gifted with a light comic touch that turned the goofy multicultural construct of his character into a recognizable human being. Chito carried his weight; even the running gag of his serial romances occasionally became an integral part of the story that was as likely to lead to a dramatic conflict as an interlude of comic relief.
The two of them would ride together for five years in a popular series of 29 films that were lean and exemplary models of the genre. Over half of them were directed by the talented (if underappreciated) Leslie Selander, who could be counted on for taut pacing and expert unobtrusive cinematography.
A good example, and typical of the peak the series had reached by its midway point, is the 1950 “Storm Over Wyoming,” which begins with the boys wandering north looking for work after Chito’s given all their money away to the latest pretty face. With the rotten luck of all cowboy heroes, they end up in a bloody war between sheep men and cattle ranchers. And while they naturally sign on as cowhands, it’s unclear at first whether or not they’ve made the right choice (an ambiguity enhanced by the judicious casting against type of perennial badhat Kenneth McDonald as their boss.)
It turns out that the war has been engineered by Rawlins (Bill Kennedy), foreman of the sheep ranch, to divert attention from the fleecing he’s been giving his own employer. The volatile situation soon forces him to silence one of his own men with a dose of hot lead, in the process framing Tim and Chito for the murder.It’s a formula setup, but one that’s worked out with style and clever bits of business, from the pivotal role played by yet another of Chito’s girlfriends to Holt’s use of the new-fangled science of ballistics to clear himself. The climax is abrupt but satisfying, with Rawlins groveling in the dirt as Holt stands over him with fists clenched in frustration. After all the shooting, lynching and noisy skullduggery, it only took a single punch to set things right.Ending with “Desert Passage” in 1952, Holt’s was among the last of the B Western series, and (thanks to RKO’s refusal to take the ultra-cheapie route into which even genre kingpin Republic Studios had been forced), it was very nearly the last one of any real quality. In fact, the economics of the Holt series is the subject of minor controversy among film historians, for RKO listed it as a money-loser for the last two years of its run – but it’s been suggested that profits were diverted by bookkeeping to offset the costs of other studio products. Perhaps the fact that the series was allowed to run in the red for two years speaks for itself.
Not that it seemed to matter to Tim Holt. Since the late 1940s he’d been spending much of his time in Oklahoma, where there was still space between the cities to ride a horse just for the joy of it, and where a stranger’s smile could be taken at face value and not merely part of a photo op. His father had died the year before the RKO series ended and, lacking any real interest in the Hollywood scene, Holt turned his back on it all and simply went into another line of work. The offers still came, but except for a couple of TV appearances, a decent little monster movie and a couple of low-budget oddities, he turned them all down.
At the time of his death in 1973, he was working as a broadcasting executive in Oklahoma City, still living life as he always had – on his own terms and shooting from the hip, an example that’s as much his legacy as all those first-class little Westerns he left us to remember him by.
