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Wonderful Movie

one of my absolute favorites!

i must have seen a different film!!

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

It's 1861 in Georgia. Barbara Payton is married to Craig Stevens. They live in the Big White House and own a cotton plantation. There is a pleasant visit from two West Point graduates, Good Old Boy James Craig, Payton's former lover, and handsome young Yankee Guy Madison. It's at once clear that Payton and Craig still have a yen for each other.Suddenly it's 1864. The war is raging in Georgia, and if you don't believe it, just watch "Gone With the Wind" again. Payton's husband disappears without further ado. Craig is now a Confederate Major and Madison a Bluebelly officer, and that damned Yankee Sherman is beginning his march through Georgia with the aim of destroying the crops that are feeding the Confederate Army.Sherman's only link to his supplies is a single railroad line that passes near Payton's Place and an unassailable mountain that looks like Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Craig is assigned the task of schlepping four light cannons up to the top of the mountain through an internal passageway, and then blowing up any trains that try to get through to Sherman. The unwitting Madison is given the job of dislodging the dozen men and their cannon from the mountain top.Trains are blown to pieces. Cannon fire is exchanged. Payton does her best to help Craig and the rest atop the mountain. Craig manages to hold up Sherman's trains for a month, at considerable sacrifice to himself, his men, and the woman he loves.The irony is that, in real life, Sherman's supply line was constantly being cut by cavalry raids and his troops were being strung out in order to protect the railway from men like Craig. So Sherman cut them loose. He dropped his dependence on the railroad and he and his men foraged their way through Georgia all the way to Savannah, living off the land while destroying a wide swath of it.The writers have done their homework on Civil War era cannons. They know what's big and what's small. They have the approximate ranges okay. And the director shows us the artillery actually being loaded after first being scrubbed out. When somebody loads a gun with double shot, we see the gun being loaded with double shot.The film is undone by rudimentary special effects and weak acting. Guy Madison looks terrific and was evidently a nice guy. I took some courses at his alma mater. And he was in the U. S. Coast Guard, another point in his favor. It's just that he's not an actor. But then all the acting is on a par. Barbara Payton lacks Madison's physical splendor but she's not much of a performer either, but for an entirely different reason. With Madison, it's difficult to tell what emotion he's experiencing. We attribute feelings to his character because the context demands that we do. See "the Kuleshov experiments" on Google. Payton, on the other hand, signals her emotions with the plain-spoken clarity of a traffic light. Here is "happiness"; here is "defiance"; here is "anger." The film doesn't really take sides in the conflict. Everyone gets his or her share of understanding. But then political issues are never really explored, so there are no speeches about state's rights or let us alone to continue our way of life.The epilogue appears as a title at the end, a kind of clumsy paraphrase of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, informing us that we have been forged together now as a united nation. The viewer is permitted a tired smile.

Make no mistake, Guy Madison invented the word "cool". Any dictionary dated before his birth that has the word "cool" in it, is a forgery.Knowing this helps to cast him in the correct role. He was meant to be the "cool" character who makes sense out of situations in which lesser characters lose their heads.Here, he is perfectly cast. He is the fourth character, actually, in the love triangle, which is where he does best.The southern belle's husband appears only briefly, and is afterwards only spoken of in his endeavors in this Civil War adventure.The other member of the triangle is an artillery officer for the South, who resembles Gable in looks, but in character is more like John Wayne.Guy Madison plays the Union artillery officer opposing him. He is also a friend of all three of the other characters.The story is a familiar one, one that has been made many times since, of Confederates on a mountain, trying to buy time for their army.What really makes this film special is that it could have been cliché, but it avoids all of the clichés. The characters are probably much too believable and three dimensional for the modern beavis or butthead, but easy for most people to relate to and feel some empathy for. This is not for the IMDb bubble boy.The soldiers are especially three dimensional. One Union soldier whom we expect to be the usual cliché jerk, actually becomes a very sympathetic character in this drama.The events seem to be written as they occur. Nothing looks contrived, so when we find the coincidence of the friends meeting in battle on opposite sides, it becomes the only coincidence, making it quite credible, as in a world where there are a million possible coincidences an hour, one is sure to happen.It is the natural flow and non judgmental occurrences, where the chips land wherever they may land, that make this special.Excellent war Western.

Other than moving quite slowly at times, especially in the beginning, this Civil War feature is not bad. The story is interesting, and eventually it has a fair amount of action and tension. The cast and characters are adequate, if nothing more, and while the settings and details sometimes stretch history and/or credibility, in a more general sense the situation rings true with the kinds of things that happened during the conflict.The beginning sets up two potential conflicts, with a romantic rivalry intersecting with a friendship that will be tested by the fighting between north and south. It takes rather longer than necessary to establish things, but it moves at a better pace when the main story starts. The main plot, which concerns the desperation effort of a small band of Confederate soldiers to break up a crucial Union supply line, produces some interesting drama and is told with generally interesting details. It's a solid feature with enough to make it worth seeing.

William Cameron Menzies is perhaps the best production designer in American motion picture history (Gone With the Wind, et alia) and his work as director applies the design principles which he espoused, such as with this film, including a prime emphasis upon cinema as a graphic art, a visual rather than literal interpretation of a script, filling that metaphysical space between scenario and direction with an artist's point of view, while avoiding a potentially incorrect objective sensibility. The narrative tells of a pair of best friends and West Point classmates, Georgian Clay Clayburn (James Craig) and Yankee Will Denning (Guy Madison) who are wearing officers' coats of opposing artillery units during the War Between The States, and of the inevitable military engagement between them, featuring a most dramatic segment involving the difficult placement of Confederate cannons atop a mountain overlooking Union rail supply lines, shot with Menzies' intriguing pictorial effects and unique camera angles. An independent King Brothers production under the aegis of RKO, DRUMS IN THE DEEP SOUTH is not replete with good performances, although Craig is solid as is his custom, while Barbara Payton, as Clayburn's lover, tries hard and is at the pinnacle of her short-lived beauty, with Dimitri Tiomkin's lush score properly evocative for this generally prescriptive film.