In Old California is a fun, surprisingly complex John Wayne vehicle from more positive and principled days. It features a good good guy (gosh, even goes to church! feature that!), a couple of bad bad guys - and even a character that transforms from shady to admirable.

It's a move that takes one's attention, keeps it, and sends one off feeling good. If that's your idea of a good movie experience, give it a go.

The script of this Republic cheapo may be uneven (episodic and repetitious), and the casting too (Binnie Barnes looks every bit of her 40 years, and Edgar Kennedy is the very poor man's Walter Brennan), but it is always engaging, and frequently endearing. Wayne gets a chance to show his way with gentle humour as the soft-spoken, milk-drinking druggist who smiles at insults, then shows the nasty men a little trick--he can bend a coin in half--that makes them skedaddle. Though unfortunately matched with Kennedy, Patsy Kelly, the wisecracking New York comedian, shows a timing as neat as Wayne's with his trigger finger (as in all these sort of mild-hero Westerns, he is a dead shot).

The comedy occasionally turns, none too smoothly, into serious, even grave, matters, with a death by poisoning, a typhoid epidemic among the gold, and the depiction of how the villains seek to profit not simply by shooting but by selling overpriced and tainted medicine. But if the film is not terribly compelling it is always enjoyable, and is not lacking in surprises, especially from the female players. All in all, though this movie suffers from the lack of money and quality control that a major studio would have provided, it also has an easygoing charm often missing from bigger and slicker films.