Streets of Laredo is a remake of Paramount's successful Texas Rangers with William Holden, William Bendix, and Macdonald Carey playing the parts that were done thirteen years earlier by Fred MacMurray, Jack Oakie, and Lloyd Nolan. Color is added and if anything this is a remake that proved better than the original.
Three amiable outlaws get separated running from a posse. Two of them Holden and Bendix join the Texas Rangers and Carey continues his outlaw ways. Carey also as the film progresses demonstrates that he's a good deal more vicious than when we first meet him.
Between them they have a lot of adventures on both sides of the law. But it is inevitable that they are destined for a showdown.
There's a nice performance here from Alfonso Bedoya, fresh from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as Calico another outlaw with a murderous protection racket.
Bill Bendix though he's never bad in anything, is really miscast in a western. He's just too urban a type to be a convincing western sidekick. Holden is a year away from his breakthrough part in Sunset Boulevard, in Streets of Laredo he's in one of his 'smiling Jim' parts as the amiable good guy. He fit those parts well, but he never would have had the career he did had he stuck to them.
Western fans will definitely like this one, enough action and gunplay for any fan of the genre.
