BAYOU (1957) **
Peter Graves stars as Martin, a big city architect who comes down to the bayou to design a new civic center. He meets Marie (Lita Milan), a feisty Cajun woman who’d rather read books than go out partying and takes an instant liking to her. Ulysses (Timothy Carey) is the lecherous creep who has eyes for Marie and is always trying to force himself on her. When Martin bests him in a boat race, it sets off a heated rivalry between the two men. Tempers flare when Marie chooses Martin to be her man and tragedy strikes when her father is killed in a sudden storm. It all comes to a head with a brawl between Martin and Ulysses at her father’s funeral.
Bayou is a deep fried southern melodrama that benefits from a solid cast. Graves makes for a square, but likeable hero and Carey is a hoot as the greasy, sweaty brute. (His out-of-control dancing at a wedding is pretty funny.) We also get Roger Corman vets Jonathan Haze and Ed Nelson popping up in supporting roles.
Director Harold (Terror in the Haunted House) Daniels gets a lot of mileage out of the strong location work. The authentic looking extras in the background also help to provide colorful local flavor. However, the pacing is often sluggish. Scenes seem to come and go without much consequence and some sequences go on seemingly forever (like the wedding scene). The melodramatic plot only occasionally comes to life, and that’s mostly because of the performers (many of which sport laughably bad Cajun accents). The theme song (which sounds like it’s being sung by a Dean Martin impersonator) is pretty catchy though.
Producers later added spicy sex scenes and extra banjo music and repackaged the film as Poor White Trash, resulting in a box office smash that played at drive-ins for years to come.
AKA: Poor White Trash.