When Tim Holt made The Mysterious Desperado (1949), he was acting in at least four B westerns for RKO each year, in addition to occasional roles in much more prominent films like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and His Kind of Woman (1951). Holt was perfectly content concentrating on these westerns; he was good at them, the public was satisfied by them, critics respected them, and they were hugely profitable, made at a cost of $80,000-100,000 each and usually grossing up to five times that amount. Little wonder that RKO kept churning them out every two-to-three months.

The Mysterious Desperado was Holt's thirteenth B western since World War II (he'd also made well over a dozen before the war), and he'd go on to star in sixteen more before calling it quits with Desert Passage (1952). Unlike many other movie series around Hollywood, Holt's pictures maintained a consistent high quality of production through to the end. (The films of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers also preserved their high standards.) Like most of Holt's others, The Mysterious Desperado is full of solid action, beautiful landscapes in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, Calif., and above-par editing and musical scoring.

Most of all, it has Holt himself, whose looks, athleticism, and horsemanship show why he was so popular. In fact, Holt's childhood friend, the western director Budd Boetticher, once said that he felt Holt and Joel McCrea were the two best horsemen in town. Holt even had a reputation as Hollywood's fastest draw, supposedly able to clear his holster in just five frames of film -- about one-fifth of a second.

In this picture, Holt plays a character named Tim Holt (how's that for a strong star persona?) who leaves his job at an Arizona ranch when his friend and sidekick Chito (played as usual by Richard Martin) learns that he has inherited his late uncle's estate in California. Arriving there, they learn the uncle was murdered and his son is wrongly accused, and they set about getting to the bottom of the mystery, with plenty of fistfights and gunplay along the way. The leading lady is played by the actress known as "Movita" (real name: Maria Luisa Castaneda), who had a sporadic career but appeared in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and The Hurricane (1937). She later was briefly married to Marlon Brando and died in 2015 at age 98.

Critics received this picture well. The Hollywood Reporter praised the "savage fistfights that are unusually convincing," and Variety declared, "Producer Herman Schlom slams home a strong credit with this one, ably aided and abetted by Lesley Selander's knowing way with an oater... Holt's as strong, silent and quick-on-the-trigger as ever." The trade paper also singled out "Paul Sawtell's rip-roaring score" and the "excellent photography" of Nicholas Musuraca, a top RKO cinematographer who had shot Out of the Past (1947), The Locket (1946), and The Ghost Ship (1943), among other atmospheric classics.

By Jeremy Arnold

SOURCES:
James Robert Parish, Great Western Stars
Buck Rainey, Heroes of the Range
David Rothel, Tim Holt