Masked Raiders

Tim Holt and his Irish-Mexican sidekick are in top-notch form in this superior western from the late 1940's. Tim & Chito find themselves involved in a confrontation with masked raiders terrorizing the honest citizenry. With cool determination they soon learn that things are not what they seem to be .......

This film boasts a good script and plenty of action The casting is great, with a plum role for future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore. Richard Martin, as Chito, was one of the all-time best sidekicks ! Tim Holt was easily the best actor to star in B-westerns.

I highly recommend this one. Good acting and a good storyline, this one is a must see.

Texas Rangers Tim Holt (Tim Holt) and Chito Rafferty (Richard Martin are sent to Wilcox, Texas to investigate the raids on Hoyt Corthell (Frank Wilcox) by a band of masked raiders led by the Diablo Kid. Posing as cowhands, they are stopped and taken to the Trevitt Ranch where they meet Gale Trevitt (Marjorie Lord), her younger brother Artie (Gary Gray) and her Uncle Henry (Houseley Stevenson), father of Trig (Tom Tyler, Matt (Clayton Moore) and Luke (Jay Kirby) , who have taken Tim and Chito captive. Tim is wounded, during a holdup, by Doc Nichols (Charles Arnt) as he is about to capture one of the raiders, actually the Trevitt family led by Gale posing as the Diablo Kid. Tim and Chito eventually learn that all of the local ranchers are being victimized by Corthell, and that Gale and her family are just taking back and returning what has been stolen by the Corthell gang, working with the crooked town Marshal, Barlow (Harry Woods).

A neat little Tim holt western with some fine twist on the masked raiders story. I thought it would be a mystery western with the masked raiders being a villain and his identity would be revealed at the end. But the masked raider is a Robin Hood figure - and the bad guys are the banker and the marshal who have hoodwinked ranchers into losing their ranches. It's an above average entry with enough action and a shift in the plot to keep you glued on the screen.

In this film Texas Rangers Tim Holt and Richard Martin are sent to the corrupt town of Wilcox, Texas to stop a mysterious bandit known as The Diablo Kid and the Masked Raiders who aid and abet her in her crime spree.

Said crime spree seems to be directed at banker Frank Wilcox and sheriff Harry Woods. Just the casting of Harry Woods as the sheriff and you already know this sheriff is going to be corrupt. Woods runs the town with a heavy hand and has a no gun ordinance in town. Which seems kind of stupid when the Masked Raiders come into town shooting and rob the bank once again and no one can stop them. Of course there's a compensatory factor that Woods is a bully and likes using the law to push people around.

Tim and Chito in the end get to the bottom of it all and get quite the surprise when the identity of The Diablo Kid is revealed. There's enough action in Masked Raiders to satisfy any B western fan, delivered by Tim Holt, the best of the B west.

This was a lot of fun; probably the type of thing youngsters enjoyed in 1949 when it came out. I'm originally from Texas, so the geography discussed was a bit baffling. In the opening, two Texas Rangers report to their boss, who gives them an assignment in a Texas town called "Willcox." Of course, there's no such place, but this is a movie, so we play along. One of the rangers asks, "Well, where is Willcox?" His boss walks over to a big map of Texas on the wall, points to an area around Wichita Falls, and says, "It's in the northern part of the state, up near the mountains." That got me laughing because there are no mountains anywhere near there. But there's more... When the two rangers get to a ranch on the outskirts of "Willcox," they pose as out of work cowboys and tell the woman who owns the ranch they were headed to town to look for jobs. She tells them Willcox is a bad place. Instead, they should ride on to Marfa. "It's only a couple hours' ride from here." Marfa, in far west Texas, is, to say the least, a lot farther away than a two-hour ride, whether a person is riding on a horse or in a Cadillac. Either a script writer was having some fun, or the Ranger boss pointed to the wrong area of the state when he described Willcox. In a major film, these would be awful, but they're nit picky details for a B movie, and easy to overlook. Especially when the ranch owner is Marjory Lord, who would play Danny Thomas's wife in the 50's TV sitcom, "Make Room for Daddy," and one of her cousins is played by handsome Clayton Moore, sans his Lone Ranger mask. Tim Holt stars in this, riding a Palomino dressed out in silver trimmed tack. Ha! A bit flashy for an out of work cowboy.

Bank robberies by the Diablo Kid's gang, shady townspeople, appealing ranch lady and her sweet little brother, horseback chases and shootouts - all done in a nice production with good music and nice sound effects including chirping birds in outdoor scenes. Nicely done escapism; I think I'll watch the next one in this Tim Holt series coming up next in a TCM double-feature.