The son of silent film star Jack Holt, Beverly Hills-born Tim Holt followed his father into show business and almost immediately caught the attention of RKO Radio Pictures with a small role opposite Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas (1937). After being cast by RKO as a fresh-faced cavalry officer out of his league in dangerous territory in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), the fledgling actor proved his mettle against such A-list film stars as Joseph Cotten in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine (1946), and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). An expert horseman and one of Hollywood's "fast draw" movie cowboys, Holt also had a lucrative sideline in RKO B-westerns and proved so popular with moviegoers after his return from duty in World War II that he began using his own name in his films. Law of the Badlands (1951) was one of nearly 30 westerns pairing Holt with frequent sidekick Richard Martin, with the partners playing Texas Rangers this time out, tasked by the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington D.C. to ankle a counterfeiting ring operating out of the aptly-named frontier town Badland. With the advent of television, and the growing number of TV westerns flooding the market, Law of the Badlands lost money for RKO and Holt hung up his sixguns the following year, diversifying his resume by staging rodeos and working in radio. He returned to pictures in 1957 as the star of the sci-fi classic The Monster That Challenged the World.

By Richard Harland Smith