by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film
Charles and I picked to screen last night was Drums in the Deep South — an odd title because neither the film
itself nor its soundtrack depicts anyone playing drums — a 1951 “B”-plus
Western set during the Civil War made by producers Maurice and Frank King and
released through RKO. It was shot in Supercinecolor (the follow-up to the
Cinecolor process of the early 1930’s, which managed to photograph blue before
Technicolor did but did not have the vibrancy of three-strip Technicolor at his
best) — though the print we were watching, a public-domain download, had faded
to green and brown, looking more like a color film of today than either
Techncolor or Cinecolor (“super” or not) at their best. The film began life as
a story by Hollister Noble (whose only other credits on imdb.com are for the
stories for Errol Flynn’s 1952 film Mara Maru and another 1952 production, Mutiny) that got turned into a screenplay by Philip
Yordan and Sidney Harmon. The most interesting behind-the-camera credit by far
on Drums in the Deep South was its production designer and director, William Cameron Menzies, who got his
start in films in the early 1920’s and designed the spectacular sets for the
1924 Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. fantasy The Thief of Baghdad. In 1931 he became a director and eventually
became known for movies that were visually spectacular but a bit dramatically
static, including the 1932 Chandu the Magician (a potentially great movie let down by its
dull cast — the magnificent Bela Lugosi as the villain excepted — and
overshadowed by the much cheaper but also considerably better serial sequel The
Return of Chandu, in which
Lugosi got promoted from villain to hero and totally out-acted Edmund Lowe as
Chandu), the 1936 Things to Come (another magnificent-looking movie, fascinating in parts but laden down
by the didacticism of its screenwriter, as well as author of the source novel,
H. G. Wells), and later sci-fi cheapies like the original Invaders from Mars (1953) and The Maze (1953).
Menzies’ most famous production
designer/art director (the two mean essentially the same thing: the person who
designs the sets and works with the director to determine the overall visual
“look” of a film) credit was on the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind, and since that’s also a story set during
(and immediately after) the Civil War in the South — indeed, both films take
place in Georgia and center around a big plantation — comparisons between Gone
With the Wind and Drums
in the Deep South are
inevitable. The problem is they aren’t very flattering: Drums in the Deep
South is only 85
minutes long (Gone With the Wind is nearly four hours) and has some interesting actors, but James Craig
is hardly in the same league as Clark Gable (as MGM learned when they tried him
and John Carroll as replacement Gables in the early 1940’s while the real one
was in combat during World War II) and Barbara Payton, despite some genuine
edginess in her performance (her best work in films was opposite James Cagney
in the 1950 Warners gangster drama Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye) that showed her to be an actress of
promise, was hardly comparable to Vivien Leigh. The story begins at the Georgia
cotton plantation of Albert Monroe (Taylor Holmes) and his niece, Kathy Summers
(Barbara Payton). One night in 1861 Kathy’s husband, Col. Braxton Summers
(Craig Stevens), brings over two of his classmates from West Point, Major Will
Denning from Boston (Guy Madison) and another Southerner from a nearby
plantation, Major Clay Clayburn (James Craig, top-billed). The reunion is an
edgy one because Clay once dated Kathy before the married Summers instead, and
the Clayburn family went downhill — they lost their plantation because their
father ran up so much debt he couldn’t pay it back — and Clay briefly claims to
have regained his family’s land and fortune, but he quickly confesses to Kathy
that he really didn’t and one wonders why he bothered to lie about it. The
reunion gets even edgier when the plantation residents, including a lot of
happy, contented Black sla- — oops, I mean servants —receive word that Fort Sumter has been
fired on and the Civil War has started. Col. Summers goes off to fight with the
Confederacy — and is never seen again in the entire film, though towards the
end Kathy gets word that he survived the war — while Major Denning returns to
Boston and ends up back in Georgia as a Union commander with General Sherman’s
army. As for Clay, he becomes some sort of Confederate commando (where, oddly,
his uniform isn’t the regulation grey but, through some quirk of Supercinecolor
and/or the condition in which it’s survived, blue, albeit a light powder blue
instead of the deep blue of the Union uniform). Three years pass, represented
by a montage with dates spread across it, and then it’s 1864, Sherman is
marching through Georgia and the Confederate command has figured out that the
one place on his train route where he’s vulnerable to attack is Snake Gap,
which just happens to be next
to the Monroe plantation and is overlooked by a tall bluff called the Devil’s
Mountain and, Charles and I were convinced, is actually the same Devil’s Tower
in Wyoming that in 1977 was used as the meeting point between earthlings and
the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The Confederates realize that if they can
get four 12-pound Brooke cannon on top of the mountain, they can shell the
Union army’s oncoming trains, put them out of commission and thereby delay
Sherman’s march by a month until he can come up with replacement supplies and
another way of getting them to his men. The problem is how to get them up
there, since the face of the Devil’s Mountain is virtually sheer. Only Clay,
being from the neighborhood, knows that the inside of the mountain is
honeycombed with caves that will provide a commando force of 20 men an
opportunity to pull four cannon to the top, assemble them there and fire them
at the Union trains. He picks a team of people who are all too aware that,
because there’ll be no way to resupply them once they get to the top of the
mountain, this is essentially a suicide mission. The cannon get dragged through
the caves, though not without a few accidents — including a sequence in which
one man nearly falls into a cavern and has to be pulled out with a rope — and
one finally gets why
William Cameron Menzies was interested in this story: he responded to the whole
challenge of making a film set largely inside caves and keeping it interesting.
Unfortunately, the cave sequences are by far the most exciting in the film;
otherwise it’s a rather dull love triangle between Clay, Denning (who’s absent
from the next 60 percent or so of the film after the opening sequence but
suddenly returns as an officer with Sherman’s army and the challenge of
knocking out the Confederate cannon atop Devil’s Mountain — for a while this
starts to seem like The Guns of Navarone in the Civil War, though The Guns of Navarone wouldn’t be filmed for another decade) and
Kathy, who gets threatened with rape by a Union officer occupying her home (her
uncle shoots the guy before he can subject her to the Fate Worse Than Death, but is shot himself for his pains;
later she sees a photo of her would-be assailant’s kids and is
conscience-stricken enough to write a letter to his family back home in
Michigan), sends signals to the Confederates on top of Devil’s Mountain what
the Union officers bivouacking in her home are planning to do about the guns.
The Union army brings in a 24-pound Dahlgren naval gun, intending to park it on
the railroad tracks just out of range of the Confederate guns on the
mountaintop so they can aim it at the top and take out the Confederate cannon,
but the Confederates work a plan around that: they load their own cannon with
double the usual amount of gunpowder, increasing the range but also making it
more likely for the cannon to blow up when fired. To prevent the latter, they
need to reinforce the cannon by wrapping them in wire — and Kathy figures out
how to get them the wire: by taking it from the innards of her family’s piano.
(One of the Union officers discovers this when he bangs the keys of the piano —
and they make only the clunking noise of their mechanism, not musical sounds.)
Ultimately Major Denning, who remember also knows the area, says the way to get rid of
the Confederate artillery is to blow up the mountain — given that it’s
honeycombed with caves, it will collapse easily — only that means everyone
inside as well as on top will be killed. Kathy asks Denning if she can make one
last-ditch appeal to the men inside to surrender before they get blown up with
the mountain, but she makes a b-i-i-i-g mistake: she dresses in a dark blue dress and gets
picked off by one of the commandos who mistakes it for a Union Army uniform.
With her dying breath she talks the other eight survivors of the original team
into going down the mountain and emerging before Denning and his Union crew set
off the charge — and she and Clay stay behind and get blown up for one of those
bizarre “the lovers are united in death” endings that were all the rage during
the Romantic era of culture that was going on during the Civil War but now just
seem stupid. Drums in the Deep South is actually a pretty good idea for a movie, if you can forget how much
better these tropes had been done again and again and again in earlier films, but Menzies’ direction is
occasionally creative but shows the limitations of the strangulation-poor
budget he was working with (for Invaders from Mars he planned the entire production in 3-D,
including building sets with forced perspectives that would look especially good
in 3-D, but just before he was scheduled to shoot he found that his producer
didn’t have the money for a 3-D camera) and, aside from Payton (the only woman in the cast!), the acting leaves a lot to be desired. Also the plot has almost has
many holes in it as the Devil’s Mountain itself — one energetic imdb.com
contributor put up five “Goofs” entries and all were about mistakes in the presentation of
artillery (mostly saying that the guns mentioned in the dialogue couldn’t
really do what the script showed or said they could do — though he got one
point wrong which the film got right: he thought the Confederates were “double
shotting” their guns, putting two cannonballs in each gun, which would reduce their range; in fact they were double-charging their guns, using one cannonball and twice
the normal amount of gunpowder) — and overall Drums in the Deep South emerges as a pleasant time-filler, decent
entertainment but also pretty forgettable, not good enough to be classic and
not bad enough to be camp.
