The King Brothers assembled some decent names for this Civil War actioner - Philip Yordan wrote the script, William Cameron Menzies directed, James Craig, Barbara Payton and Guy Madison starred, and Dimitri Tomkin did the score.
There are two plot strands - one a perfectly decent action/war tale about the Confederates determined to bring a gun up to some heights to blow up a Union train - this is quite smart and well done, if not enough to support a feature. The second strand is less successful - Confederate James Craig is in love with married Payton and his best friend Guy Madison fights for the Union... only Madison isn't interested in Pyton, she's married to Craig Stevens who is barely in the film off fighting in some other field of the war.
Payton isn't very good - the excitement and colour of her private life didn't really convey on screen, it's as though she wasn't that interested in what she was doing on screen. (She's not awful, just bland.) Craig is alright. Madison is as good as he normally is, ie. bording until he's required to act angry when he fails miserable. He disappears for most of the first two-thirds of te movie, another dramatic fflaw.
Several scenes are reminiscent of Gone with The Wind on which Menzies worked so memorably as art director: the opening scene taking place on the day war is declared, a scene where Confederate Miss Payton is molested by a Union soldier who gets shot (though to be fair this time the soldier is humanised, in a nice touch).
It's alright - the movie keeps threatening to be better than it is but it never gets there.
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