It’s time for a little more John Wayne action! Interestingly this one I got to see in more of a natural format than the others. So it looks a whole lot older than the others and the sound quality also ends up being a bit blurry. It helps with the authenticity of course but ultimately this wouldn’t be one of the strongest Wayne titles. We do get to see him being undercover again which is always fun though.

John is seemingly wandering through the land when he bumps into a guy who was about to be attacked in a trap by some robbers. John scares them off easily enough and then finds out that this town has been terrorized by this gang for a long time. What they need is to be able to carve out a path for a new railway which will help the local economy as well as allow for the authorities to get there quicker. The villains are determined to prevent that happening. So how can John pull this off? The townsfolk can help him dig the tunnel through but otherwise the villains have the edge on guns. Well…maybe he can use them to make the tunnel.

It’s a pretty fun turnaround to have John literally making the villains do the hard work by tricking them into thinking that they’re all on the same side. It’s something that you can’t imagine most characters would be able to pull off but John has that natural confidence about him. He just has to make them think that it’s their idea and then he’s off to the races. Mainly this is done through a conversation at the bar.

Every time John says the right thing, the villains are quick to affirm how smart John is being and that they’re glad he sees it their way. John has that confident smirk the whole time and fortunately he is actually really good at bombing and detonation so he knows how to do this even without a written plan. It’s also a good thing that he worked fast since the town naturally gets the wrong idea and nearly gets together to take him down. Now that would have been rough. In their defense, it was looking bad for John I suppose.

They had wired the governor to ask for help but unfortunately had to pass it through the mail room where it was intercepted. It was not one of their best moments to put it mildly. Additionally, John was a newcomer here and seemed really suspicious. By the end of the film we get a twist about John but the hero wasn’t really in a position to unveil his true reason for being here. So he played it well and ultimately things worked out well enough.

This film definitely focused more on the gun fights than the fist battles this time around. We had long shootouts at the railway twice, and in each case it was mainly a stalemate with the villains getting the slight edge. These battles still aren’t quite as exhilarating as a classic fist fight but it definitely does take talent to get all of the characters set up like this.

As always the writing is pretty good here. You have a solid script and the pacing is on point. These elements tend to be the same for all of the old John Wayne titles so I’d be more surprised if it had changed. The films really go by in an instant but this is really the right way to handle a wester. For the most part these films are about glamorizing it to an extent and showing how much fun the wild west could be while newer films tend to take a much more grounded approach that isn’t generally as much fun.

Sure, deep down we know that living in the wild west was probably not that much fun, but the films let you forget that for a few minutes to just enjoy the story. I definitely can’t fault them for that. I would have liked a bit more action in this film but beyond that I have no real complaints. The film delivers on exactly what you would have expected from it.

Overall, Rainbow Valley is a pretty good film. It feels more dated than the rest but if you watch the smoothed version for it (Assuming there is one, but I bet there is) then it probably won’t feel any different than the rest. It’s always fun to see John taking command of a situation and showing the villains what is up. Ironically this is one of the few times where the town was ready to fight back and evidently had been doing so even before John showed up. They were unfortunately outgunned at this and tended to be on the losing side but at least they tried. That’s way more than they tend to do in any of these western films so that was a good change of pace. If you haven’t checked this film out yet, you should definitely change that.

Overall 7/10