An example of elevating a B-movie into art, Thunderhoof is a superbly photographed (by Columbia stalwart Henry Freulich), sharply edited (Jerome Thoms) and powerfully acted story of a Texas rancher (a gracefully aged Preston Foster) on a quest to capture a wild horse across the Mexican desert. He is accompanied by his beautiful, younger Mexican wife (Mary Stuart) and "The Kid," a young man whose life he once saved. When The Kid falls in love with his surrogate father’s wife, the film enters the psychological territory of the post-war Oedipal western—a thematic current that would include Red River, also released in 1948.

Among Columbia’s B-unit directors, Phil Karlson stood out for the consistency of his work and the coherence of his vision. Thunderhoof was made so cheaply that the studio did not even commission an original score. Yet the stock music, perhaps unintentionally, enhances the choreography of the bodies, the rebellious spirit of the titular horse, and the film’s underlying erotic tensions—an element notably present in many Columbia films of the late 1940s.