Perfectly adorable

An action-packed slog

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

The year is 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War. In Georgia, Atlanta, cotton plantation owner Braxton Summers invites two of his former West Point classmates, Clay Clayburn & Will Denning, to dinner with him & his new wife Kathy (who was formerly in love with Clay). But before they can eat, war is declared. Fast forward to 1864 & Will & Clay are fighting on opposite sides of the war. Clay, now a major with the Confederates, is picked to infiltrate the same area & find a way to sabotage a Union railway & cut off supplies to the Yankees. Placing three cannons on a mountaintop, Clay & his team of volunteers manage to blow up the tracks & a couple of Union trains passing through. They are so good at keeping the area locked down that Will, now an officer in the Union army, is sent in to prevent any further damage. Kathy, who is still living in the old mansion (Braxton has been captured by the Yankees), tries her best to help her former lover fight the enemy. But Will & Clay, who are still best friends, each don't realise that the other is in the area.William Cameron Menzies is legendary in the field of production design for Hollywood's early era. Having won awards for his work on such films as 1924's The Thief of Bagdad & of course his magnum opus, Gone with the Wind, Menzies was so good at his job that when the chance came to finally direct a film himself, he jumped at the chance.With Menzies at the helm, what was essentially a B-grade film made on a limited budget instead looks like a big budget production. It doesn't have the same resources as something like Gone with the Wind but Menzies makes it feel about as large with his resourcefulness.The story is a passably moving tale of a woman caught between two best friends fighting on opposite sides in a war that will end with one side losing badly. James Craig & Barbara Payton both make a good couple & Payton's willingness to spy on her captors in order to help her old flame sabotage the enemy's supply train is both brave & ultimately reckless. The film has one flaw & that is the lack of funds to make the battles look anything but cramped, but Menzies does his best with the limited budget. He even manages to throw in a couple of reasonably exciting moments, with Payton trying to signal Craig while a Union soldier searches for her & Craig's first attack on the enemy train. The cast make the most out of their roles & the film's unusually high production values elevate what is essentially a low budget Civil War drama into a modest war classic.

Another treasure from the America One library of public domain movies! "Drums in the Deep South" looks like a good movie, but it lacks something a good movie must have: characters the audience can care about. I looked carefully for such characters, and couldn't find one. In fact, I hardly cared what happened to any of them, even when the would-be adulterous couple was blown up at the end of the movie! I really thought the Vile Yankee Devil was going to throw himself on the fuse wire to save his buddy; he looked ready to cry. But, no; the mountain blew up--where will the aliens land now? Curiously, though this tale is supposed to be in part about a love triangle, the husband-angle goes off to war and is NEVER seen again, but is mentioned briefly to be still alive! We're never ever given a reason why Kathy REALLY preferred Clay to Braxton; Brax used complete sentences, seemed to genuinely care for Kathy, appeared to have a practical attitude towards running pseudo-Tara, and there wasn't the faintest suggestion that Brax so much as ever said a cross word to Kathy. But off he goes and she forgets him, telling Clay to learn Spanish for California, implying that that is their next stop in life.This is exceeding strange for a movie made in 1951.If ONLY Kathy had known how KEWEL Brax was going to be in a few years when he morphed into Peter Gunn! Imagine Braxton returning home to Devastation, and lurid tales of fickle Kathy...but the movie was already too long...

Although he designed and directed a number of notable films, today William Cameron Menzies is best recalled as the director of the "so bad it's good" 1953 INVADERS FROM MARS. His work with the 1951 DRUMS IN THE DEEP SOUTH might be considered a build up to that ham-fisted style, for it has the same flatness. Sad to say, it has none of the same fun.The story concerns a Confederate effort to thwart Sherman's advance on Atlanta. Strange to say, however, Georgia seems to have been transplanted to the wild west for purposes of the film, which comes complete with a mesa on which the Confederates desire to plant their cannon and fire upon the railroad below. Throw in a love triangle and some of the most uninspired acting you can obtain and you have DRUMS IN THE DEEP SOUTH.Today the film is best recalled for the presence of actress Barbara Payton (1927-1967), a performer who trembled on the brink of stardom in the late 1940s and early 1950s before she self-destructed in a hog-wallow of sex, booze, drugs, and front page scandal. It is easy to see what the fuss was about: she has a dead-pan sexuality, larger-than-life beauty, and memorable speaking voice. Unfortunately, none of these qualities have much to do with either film or role, and even her cult-status can't make up for what is basically a remarkably shallow, incredibly silly, and deadly dull film.Unless you are desperate to see what Payton looked like on the screen before she ended up as a five dollar hooker working the Sunset Strip, DRUMS ALONG THE DEEP SOUTH is a film to avoid at all costs. Treat it as you would the plague.Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

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.