Barbara Payton is who keeps those drums a beating in the Deep South. She's the mistress of a southern plantation which is a cut down version of that other Georgia plantation, Tara. In the film's prologue she and husband Craig Stevens are entertaining two old friends from West Point, Yankee boy Guy Madison and Barbara's secret paramour James Craig.
Babs is planning to run away with Jim that night, but news of the firing on Fort Sumter brings everybody's plans to a halt as the men go off to war on their respective sides. Flash forward to four years later and Stevens is in prison, but circumstance has brought Madison and Craig back to the neighborhood.
Craig is given a rough assignment, bring a pair of cannons to the top of a hollow ridge called Devil's Mountain and rain fire and destruction down on Sherman's supply train on the railroad tracks below. Guy has the unenviable duty of blasting him off the mountain. Of course neither knows the other is in command on the other side.
If the sets look familiar, particularly the plantation sequences it's because they come from Mourning Becomes Electra. That was RKO's prestige picture a few years earlier. The famous Eugene O'Neill drama cost RKO a mint and flopped at the box office. If you were Howard Hughes running RKO and looking to recoup some money, you'd find use for those expensive sets also. I'm sure that's why Drums in the Deep South was made as well as to showcase Barbara Payton. I'm sure she was on the lot because Howard had a personal interest in her as well.
Drums in the Deep South is a cut rate Gone With the Wind with heavy overtones of Eugene O'Neill. Maybe being around that Mourning Becomes Electra set might have given the writers the idea, but what emerges is a turgid melodrama and by the end of the film you don't really care who survives the film and who doesn't. Barbara Payton is no Vivien Leigh and James Craig is one pale imitation of Clark Gable.
