Perhaps best remembered by classic movie fans for his youthful supporting roles in such A-list Hollywood films as Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Tim Holt was a bone fide movie star in his own right and king of the B-movie westerns produced by RKO Radio Pictures before and after World War II. The son of silent film leading man Jack Holt, Tim Holt was already well-established as a cowboy hero at RKO when he put his career on hold to serve his country in the Pacific Theater as an Army Air Force bombardier. Upon his return to Hollywood, Holt appeared in over two dozen buddy westerns opposite Latin actor Richard Martin. Though Holt rarely played the same hero twice (and often just played Tim Holt), Martin was always "Chito Rafferty," a sidekick brand that Martin borrowed from the character he had played in RKO's 1943 war effort docu-drama Bombardier. Directed by Lew Landers, Stagecoach Kid (1949) was the tenth of 29 shoot-em-ups featuring the partners, who this time are stagecoach entrepreneurs who grapple with a gang of murderous ranchhands (led by former Warner Bros. pug Joe Sawyer) and a railroad magnate's headstrong daughter, played by actress Jeff Donnell. Years earlier, Donnell had been director Landers' leading lady in Columbia's The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942) and the actress would have an important role the following year in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950).

By Richard Harland Smith