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Jack and Tim Holt, who co-starred together in “Arizona Ranger” (‘48 RKO), with Jennifer Holt, daughter of Jack and sister of Tim. This essay started out to be a short appreciation of the films, but the more I got into the films, the more there was to say. I have been watching them since, and I am more impressed with them the more I see them. The following Christmas I got Volumes 2 and 3 of the Tim Holt DVD set. A few years ago, I caught a couple of the Holt westerns on the Encore Westerns Channel and they seemed to me, sixty years later, very well made. While the Rogers and Cassidy pictures hold up reasonably well, the Lane pictures, while having some great action scenes, seem rather flat, since Lane was a block of wood as an actor.

While I saw and enjoyed most of the Holt westerns, I generally preferred Alan “Rocky” Lane, Roy Rogers, and Hopalong Cassidy. The early show would start at 9:15, and we would then have the afternoon to play cowboys on the main wooded campus of the university. Nearly every Saturday morning I would go down to one of the two local theatres that showed westerns on Saturdays and see a show that consisted of two B westerns, a chapter of a serial, and several color cartoons. In the late forties and early fifties I was a kid growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, the home of Indiana University. From the early forties to the early fifties, he was exactly that: at his home studio of RKO Radio Pictures he was one of the biggest stars in B westerns. He’d say, ‘I’m going to be a western star some day’” (Rothel, 1994: 215). He’d walk up and down the hall in his bathrobe and practice drawing his guns.

Budd Boetticher, one of his classmates at the Culver Military Academy in the thirties and later a director, recalled to David Rothel that Holt “used to walk around in our suite of rooms there…and he often had on his ’38 revolvers and holster. He never became a major star in A pictures, but that was because he preferred his day job. Holt appeared in Stagecoach (1939, as a cavalry officer), The Magnificent Amberson (1942, as Georgie Minifer), My Darling Clementine (1946, as Virgil Earp), and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, as one of the three prospectors).

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Several movie stars appeared on the actors list: Bogart, Wayne, Grant, Fonda, but one name was unexpected: Tim Holt. Many years ago, before you could do such things instantaneously on a computer, one film buff made up lists of actors who appeared in what he considered great films. By Tom Stempel Volume 17, issue 11 / November 2013 35 minutes (8701 words)

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