Bob Custer — The Western White Hope (1925) 🇺🇸

“Give us a new Western hero!” the fans demanded in their letters to the producers.

“Mix and Desmond and Hoxie [Tom Mix | William Desmond Taylor | Jack Hoxie] still hold, but we’d like a new one as well. Get us a boy who can do the stunts; and he must be good looking and have an attractive personality.”

About a year and a half ago this demand was made. There were many youths at hand, but their attention was centered upon the sophisticated drama then beginning to be a vogue.

Bob Custer had come West, driving out, in a spirit of adventure. Of a well-to-do family, educated at the University of Kentucky, he found civil engineering’ boresome and obeyed Horace Greeley’s advice. He filled the bill — clean-cut, active, and in his early twenties. With practically no preliminary training — amateur theatricals and a few calls as extra hardly count — he chanced to be just the type an independent concern was looking for, and was signed almost immediately to star.

He is considered ideal for the youthful Texas Ranger type — six feet, and one hundred and seventy pounds of brawn and muscle — he was a football hero at college — good looking, amiable, with a pleasing personality. And, in addition to these attributes, a restless energy which gives reality to his films of youthful adventure.

He slurs his words in a lazy Southern drawl. His eyes are a blue that can be very humorous — or can glitter like steel. Bob is crazy about the movies and is having the time of his life.

The out-of-door drama seems unlikely to be his stopping point. There is nothing uncouth about him; his heritages are of Southern gentility rather than of the plains; he has the same sort of boyish charm that is Ben Lyon’s. These qualities will, most likely, eventually take him out of the saddle and into the field of drama. But for the present, however, he is thrilled at being called “the Western white hope.”

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, June 1925