Le Rocher du diable

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.

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.

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.

I watched DRUMS OF THE DEEP SOUTH for two reasons: because it's directed by visual genius William Cameron Menzies and it stars Guy Williams. Well, I wasn't disappointed by it. Even though it started slowly and this is basically a B-movie, the film eventually overcame those weaknesses because it contains one of the coolest things I've seen in a movie in a long time: a battle, with cannons, in and on Devil's Tower! The bulk of the film is about this battle and I was giddy as a kid on Christmas' Eve. Visually, the whole battle is effen brilliant! The story's setting is not in Wyoming, where Devil's Tower is actually located, but in Georgia and, like your typical B-movie, the script is filled with easy coincidences. Many will object to these things but I didn't care because the battle sequence is already up there as one of my favorite cinematic moments ever. Besides, historical and geographical inaccuracies in movies such as THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY never prevented them from being regarded as great.

The score by Dimitri Tiomkin is excellent and provides the right amount of omph to the many battle or suspense scenes. Make no mistake about it, this is more of an action movie than a drama set in the South. The start of the movie is all drama and set-up but the last hour is all action and tension.

The actors are serviceable with Guy Williams being the stand-out. What a dashing actor. Unfortunately, his role is almost an afterthought. The story concentrates mainly on James Craig and Barbara Payton's love affair. The (spectacular) resolution of their love affair is surprisingly sad, and nearly elevates the movie from a standard B-movie to a grade-A one. Had the friendship between James, Barbara and Guy's characters been a bit more fleshed out, the human aspect of the story could have been as riveting as the visual aspects, which is what really makes this little gem shine. It's obvious that Steven Spielberg saw DRUMS OF THE DEEP SOUTH and was "inspired" to use the Devil's Tower as a setting for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.

The image & sound quality of the DVD was pretty bad. Hopefully, this movie will be released with a pristine transfer so we can finally see this cool William Cameron Menzies film as it was meant to be seen and heard.

Was Menzies making "Gone With the Wind" light? Or the tragic counterpoint thereto? "Drums" is a surprise: nary an anachronistic weapon to be seen. I am so accustomed to seeing 1873 revolvers in movies about the War Between the States that this came as a shock. To see uniforms of some exactitude, especially for the artillery of all things, was refreshing indeed. I was also surprised by a very non-1950s ending. Really a far better "Civil War" motion picture than I had expected although I must say I found both the Confederate major and his lost love a bit cardboard. Madison chewed the scenery a trifle to make up for it. There were indeed plot twists and character touches although I missed any resolution for the Confederate colonel. Not at all a bad way to spend a couple of hours.