California Joe (1943) User Reviews

Are You a Cowboy?

[boblipton · 6/10 · 17 October 2009]

Don 'Red' Barry was a college football player who spent a long life as a B Western Star, mostly for Republic Pictures, which specialized in turning out just this sort of picture, in between its vehicles for singing cowboys Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers. When their biggest straight western star, John Wayne, moved on to greener pastures, Barry became their go-to star, and they produced well-written, inexpensive vehicles like this.

In the one, Barry plays a spy for the north during the Civil War, sent to California to prevent California from joining the Confederacy under the malign influence of the 'Knights of the Golden Circle.' The movie starts out with a beautifully choreographed fight sequence and there are a couple of others throughout -- Republic actually perfected the filming of the fight sequence for its B movies.

All in all a pleasant, if not terribly remarkable effort.

Grizzly deaths for a western

[mmargrajr · 6/10 · 31 December 2010]

While not one of the best of the Don "Red" Barry westerns, I am still at a loss as to why Republic never bothered using Barry as a villain in a number of gangster films. Barry could have become Republic's equivalent to Warners' James Cagney. But in this western, Barry plays a spy with a short temper and a quick trigger. He even shoot and kills two people at different times in the same room on the same day! When I first saw this movie at the Mid Atlantic Nostalgia Convention in Maryland a few years ago, I was shocked to discover how much Republic reused costumes, streets and sets. Barry's residence, as established in the beginning of the movie, is a deserted mine and it's the same sets used for a number of Republic cliffhanger serials. Want to see more repeated use of props and sets? Watch this film and scrutinize the background closely.

Double Treason in the West

[bkoganbing · 4/10 · 21 December 2014]

Watching California Joe starring Don Barry I got the feeling that Herbert J. Yates had much bigger plans for this film, but that for whatever reasons probably financial it got reduced to just another B western for one of his Republic cowboy heroes. The scope of the story demanded a bigger treatment, something on the order of the bigger budgeted westerns he later gave to Wild Bill Elliott and was giving to John Wayne. This might have originally been meant for Wayne.

Don Barry of the Union Army is sent on detached service with sidekicks Terry Frost and Wally Vernon to foil a plot by the Confederate underground organization the Knights Of The Golden Circle. But what Jefferson Davis and the rest of the Confederacy don't know is that the ones stirring things up in California are planning to double cross the Confederacy as well and set up their own Pacific Empire with the same French backing as Maximilian over in Mexico had.

That fact plus the murder of a loyal union telegrapher makes getting information to stop these plans that much easier.

It is war and I suppose Barry could be forgiven for doing a most un cowboy hero thing of shooting one of the Confederates down in cold blood after he confessed to being part of the group that murdered the telegrapher Karl Hackett. That also left young Twinkle Watts an orphan.

A lot of this was clearly left on the cutting room floor or never filmed in the first place. Not a bad B western but it was never meant to be in the B category. Watch it and I think you'll agree.