A handsome, pleasant, faintly anonymous supporting player for the best part of twenty years, Duncan Renaldo found the one part that fitted him at forty and kept it for a decade. The Cisco Kid is where to look; most of what came before is furniture.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Renaldo in almost anything and you will see the same thing: a good-looking man standing near the story, wearing the hat well, and letting the people around him make the decisions. In Trader Horn (1931) he is Peru, the young man who has come up the river with Harry Carey's old trader, and our review called him a decent young man in a hat. That was not unkind. It was all the part asked, and Renaldo did not ask more of it than the part did.
He came to acting sideways, by way of the merchant navy, portrait painting and producing short films, and signed with MGM in 1928. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929) and Trader Horn followed, the second shot in Africa with lions no set could fake. Then the big studios lost interest, and by the late 1930s he was working steadily at Republic and Monogram, in B-westerns and serials, the Three Mesquiteers pictures among them, sometimes the hero's friend and sometimes the villain, and cast as Latin whenever a script needed one because he looked the part. There were occasional trips back to the main lots, in Spawn of the North and as Lieutenant Berrendo in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Then in 1945 came In Old New Mexico for Monogram, and with it the Cisco Kid.
That is the role, and it is worth being clear why. The Cisco Kid as Renaldo played him is clean-shaven, courteous and does not kill anyone; he and Leo Carrillo's Pancho get out of trouble by being cleverer than the men causing it. Renaldo put it plainly himself: "We never killed anybody. We just outsmarted them." It happens to be what he could do. He was never convincing as a man who might hurt you, so a hero who declined to was the right fit. He played it in features from 1945 and then in 156 episodes of television between 1950 and 1956, in colour, with George Sherman directing him on five of the films. We have not reviewed the series and will not judge it at length, but it is the reason anyone still knows the name.
What does not work is everything that needs him to hold the eye on his own. Watching Trader Horn, we sat up for the lions and stayed up for Carey and Mutia Omoolu, and we kept forgetting Renaldo was in the frame until the script needed someone to stand next to Edwina Booth. He does not draw attention unless the film has told us where to look, and the MGM years mostly did not.
So skip the early prestige and find the Cisco Kid. Twenty years of standing beside the hero turned out to be the training. The character is a man who does not draw his gun, and Renaldo had been not drawing it since 1928.
Biography
Duncan Renaldo was a Romanian-born American actor. Born Vasile Dumitru Cugheanos on 23 April 1904 in Oancea, Galați County, Romania, he arrived in the United States in the early 1920s and began working in films in the late 1920s.
He appeared in early sound features including The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929) and Trader Horn (1931), in which he played Peru. In the 1930s his career was interrupted by immigration proceedings; he was convicted of perjury and served time before receiving a presidential pardon. Renaldo later worked in numerous Westerns and serials for Republic and Monogram Pictures.
He is best known for portraying the Cisco Kid in a series of films from 1945 and in the television series The Cisco Kid (1950–1956), opposite Leo Carrillo as Pancho. Renaldo received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his television work. He died on 3 September 1980 in Goleta, California.
