Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

classicsoncall You'll have to be patient for this film to get going, the early set up involves former West Point classmates reuniting at the Georgia home of Colonel Braxton Summers (Craig Stevens) and his wife Kathy (Barbara Payton). News of the arrivals sends the Mrs. into a mild panic - she and Clay Clayburn (James Craig) had a serious fling four years earlier and it's reignited when the husband Colonel takes care of some off screen business. There's the hint of another side to this romantic triangle (quadrangle?) with the appearance of Will Denning (Guy Madison), but that one doesn't go very far.As a kid I watched Madison's TV Western "The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok" and always found him to be a cool actor. He looked very young to me here in a film released the same year in which his TV program aired, which means it's been quite some time since I've seen any of those episodes. I'll have to get my hands on some.Once the initial set up is developed, the story seems to bog down a bit. Union forces led by Denning are assigned to blow up a mountain fortress from which the Rebs, commanded by his buddy Clay, are tasked with the job of destroying the rail line below, preventing supplies from reaching General Sheridan's army. Payton's character, under house arrest, manages to get information and some supplies to her lover Clay. Neither opposing commander is aware of each other's presence until close to the final denouement.What I had trouble with throughout was the logistics of the tunnels and caves of the mountain fortress resembling Devil's Tower. Even a demolition expert would have trouble explaining to me how mining the base of the tower would eventually wind up blowing it's top off. There's that, and the inconclusive ending that suggested the film's odd couple and the remaining Confederates didn't make it out alive. The Major it seems, didn't seem too upset about all that.

Corey Walker I recently purchased a 4 DVD set, which included "Shoot Out", "Apache Rifles", "Sitting Bull" and "Drums in the Deep South." Like most westerns of its type, it has a very basic plot. Nonetheless, except for the beginning and the very end, I found it to be an interesting and captivating movie. It features elements of current love, love that once was but is no more, and of course, a pretty girl. Combine that with the added dramatic irony of two friends fighting each other without realizing it, and lots of fast paced action, it makes for a fairly good western movie. What I found to be very disappointing was that two DVD's (I exchanged it today for another copy of the same movie) both have glitches, such as the picture skipping a little bit (kind of a like a skipping CD or broken record, except it's pictures, not sound) and pausing here and there for no reason. Also, an amateur could have done a better job of restoring the colour (or was it adding colour to B&W). I'm glad to know at least, that I'm not the only one experiencing these problems.I will not spoil the ending, but if I was a director re-doing the movie, I would revise the ending, or perhaps re-write it. And I found the dinner scene in the beginning to be rather lacking in action. Other than that, it was not too bad of a movie. In fact, fix the graphics and I'd really like it.Corey Walker

ark30inf I had a really hard time figuring out whether to give this a 5 or a 6. The film has a few things going for it but on the other hand it has some definite problems. I finally settled on a 6. I gave it a point for quirkiness.The casting of James Craig was obviously intended to evoke Clark Gable and Rhett Butler. Too obviously. Craig's vocal performance seemed to indicate that he also wanted to play up the Clark Gable angle. It was a bit distracting during the love scenes but he seemed to, thankfully, drift away from it during the action sequences.Guy Madison was cast because he was easy to look at. But his performance was anything but easy to look at. His character gyrated wildly from manic damnyankee enemy to soft hearted friend of the family. I couldn't tell if he was possessed or just in serious need of some mood stabilizing drugs.I never developed an empathy with the leading male and female characters. Every time they passionately kissed I kept thinking about her poor naive husband off surrounded by Sherman's Army while she played footsie with his alleged old best West Point friend.The special effects were very interesting and quite well done. But its hard to imagine that anybody ever grew any cotton in the rocky scrub that looked remarkably like Southern California during wildfire season. If you are going to spend the special effects money to matte in a giant plantation house you can at least matte it into a rich green landscape rather than a rocky gulch.I won't even mention (well actually I will) the fact that the main geographical feature of the movie is a hollowed out, honeycombed, Devil's Tower from Close Encounters. Only this one is smack dab in the middle of Georgia! The makers of this movie would have had better luck just using the real Stone Mountain and pretended it was hollow. I kept expecting the mother ship to hover over the mountain.The explosive ending seemed to be the result of the writer suddenly realizing that he had to finish his script in the next two sentences. I can't say I've seen a film that only needs 2 seconds to wrap everything up and turn off the lights.But there are a few good things that made this movie appealing. Your generic Civil War movie has a smashing good Cavalry charge in it and lots of dashing guys on horses waving swords and flags. You know they do. This film went WAY off the beaten path. The heroes of this film are the artillery.....yes....you heard it right.....the heroes are exclusively the Confederate Artillery. That deserves a rating point right there. They even got the Confederate artillery uniform colors right. Its not often you see a Civil War film where the difference between a Dahlgren gun and a Brooke's Rifle is essential to the plot. The artillery battles were handled quite skillfully.This is essentially a fifties matinee action picture. But the makers did manage to insert a couple of quite beautiful moments into the film. For a moment, a hard-hearted, oppressive, damnyankee skulker becomes human when he presents a photograph of his two babies and thinks wistfully of his family and his farm. More than one character mentions that he didn't start the war, that he was just playing the role assigned to him on the great stage. A few quiet moments about the war's real meaning and effect in this odd little shoot 'em up.

rsoonsa 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.