The Phenix City Story

Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story progresses from documentary-style objectivity to white-hot frenzy.  It's hard to imagine a film made in such disjunctive registers:  the movie begins with TV interviews soberly staged on the hot steps of a county Court House and ends with stark mayhem, filmed in high-contrast black and white, savage beatings rim-lit as if with acetylene torch or arc welding equipment.  Although the movie is pretty brutal throughout most of its 100 minutes, hyper-violence tips the balance about half-way when a police dispatcher callously says:  "Someone just threw a dead nigger kid on John Patterson's front lawn."  From that point to the film's penultimate shot -- the last image embodies law and order -- The Phenix City Story is a ferocious study in savagery, still shocking today and, probably, almost unwatchable in 1955 when this little B-movie was released.

Apparently based on actual events, The Phenix City Story concerns a crusade against vice in the titular city, a small Alabama burg just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Georgia.  Phenix City is a GI strip servicing the troops on leave from Fort Benning, located a few miles away in Georgia.  Presumably, Fort Benning and Columbus, Georgia are in a dry county -- accordingly, the vice necessarily associated with a large military base was conveniently located in Phenix City, just across the river (and the border) from Georgia.  As portrayed in the film, Phenix City consists primarily of 14th Street, a row a honky-tonks, greasy spoon cafes, and brothels, all harboring gambling dens in their backrooms.  (The film shows that the gambling is all conspicuously crooked, designed by fleece the naïve GIs out of their pay-checks.)  Vice in Phenix City is integral to its economy and represents a time-honored tradition:  shaving dice and rigging slot machines has been going on for "a hundred years" as alleged by the film's narrator.  The picture has a startling opening.  A smarmy-TV broadcaster conducts man-on-the-street interviews, the camera filming him in unflattering close-up.  The interviewer talks to a couple of people who are obviously not actors, shoving them here and there for the camera as if they were puppets or domestic cattle.  The people talk about a murder trial and their hope that corruption in the City will be stamped out.  This opening sequence is fairly long and shot documentary style on courthouse steps with people coming and going in the background -- the rubes that are interviewed are inarticulate and blink nervously in the bright sunlight.  The film, then, shows a montage of newspapers and magazines and, then, eases into the action.  Albert Patterson is a prominent local attorney.  The leader of the crime syndicate visits with him and solicits his services as counsel for the villains.  (The film proper begins with a compelling sequence in a honky-tonk introducing some of the characters and featuring a half-naked torch singer singing "The Phenix City Blues."  A patron accuses the house of cheating, gets beaten half to death by the club's enforcer, and, then, is hauled off by the crooked cops, presumably to be killed and tossed in the river.)  Patterson is looking forward to return of his son from military service in Germany and has hired a man to paint his son's name on the office door:  Patterson & Patterson.  He refuses the mob boss' offer, but also says that he will maintain scrupulous neutrality -- Patterson is old, tired, and has a bum leg and he doesn't want to get into a bloody fight with the syndicate.  Several town fathers have allied themselves into a reform party.  The mob's henchmen lure the men into a parking lot behind The Poppy Club, a saloon qua casino owned by the most menacing of the villains, and beat them badly.  John Patterson, Albert's son intervenes and is badly beaten himself.  An African-American swamper in the bar, Zeke Ward, knocks down one of the thugs and saves Patterson from serious injury.  The attack on his son forces Albert Patterson's hand -- he agrees to run for Attorney General of the State of Alabama.  The syndicate fights back by killing Zeke Ward's four-year old daughter and pitching her corpse onto Patterson's front lawn where his kids are playing.  This leads to the callous dispatch call and triggers a cycle of violence that leaves several people dead.  Patterson tries to indict the bad guys at a coroner's inquiry into once of the deaths, makes a compelling case, but is defeated by the fear of the jurors who refuse to return a verdict in his favor.  This causes the senior Patterson to run for State Attorney General. Albert Patterson wins the election but is gunned down before he can take office -- he's shot point-blank in the face in a horrific scene.  John Patterson's informant at the Poppy Club. the young woman who's suitor was beat to death early in the film, has overheard the bad guys smirking about killing the new Attorney General.  She tells John Patterson and, then, hides in the Negro part of town at Zeke Ward's place.  The bad guys converge on Zeke Ward's place and are beating and torturning the people there when Patterson shows up, resulting in some more savage fisticuffs.  The mob is poised to march on 14th Street and prepared to slaughter the Syndicate members and burn up the brothels and gambling hells.  But Patterson restrains them, just as he has earlier been restrained by Zeke Ward when he is about to kill the most evil of the mobsters with his bare hands.  The rule of law is paramount.   The National  Guard is called into town and the bad guys are defeated once again at the ballot box.  John Patterson takes office as Attorney General and vows to clean-up the city and the movie ends by looping back, at least by spoken reference, to the murder trials announced in the documentary style opening scene.

Karlson's film resembles in many ways Fritz Lang's similarly plotted The Big Heat.  But Lang's movie was elegant, punctuated with shocking violence (Lee Marvin scalding Gloria Graham with hot coffee), and tightly melodramatic.  The Phenix City Story, although vehemently right-wing, somehow feels like Brecht -- the protagonists are embodiments of social values and movements and they interact in a series of lacerating short scenes. Romance is purely perfunctory and the film is structured around a series of bloody fistfights and beatings.  There's no fat on the film and some sequences are shot like a documentary made in Hell.  The scene in which the dead child is callously flung onto Patterson's lawn, dropped among his own children, results in horrific and convincing hysteria -- Patterson's small children and his wife are crazy with fear.  Scenes involving violence at polling places show drunks being dragged in to vote, righteous folks beaten bloody, women raped, their mouths and noses sluicing blood, cars overturned and bombs exploding -- some of this lensed as Soviet-style montage, other sequences seemingly covertly filmed in Phenix City itself:  we see staggering drunks and people leaning against utility poles to keep from falling and exterior stairways to crumbling three-story houses decorated with whores, people fighting aimlessly in back alleys and everywhere a pervasive sense of squalor.  This is a film so ripe with corruption that you can almost smell it.  I had seen this movie earlier in Chicago when it was revived as part of a film noir series at the Gene Siskel Theater -- I recalled the movie as having something to do with the Ku Klux Klan.  Obvously, I misremembered the film but it is a salient point that the person to whom the most terrible wrong has been done, Zeke Ward (who has lost his daughter to the murderers and whose wife is beaten half to death by mob enforcers) intervenes to keep John Patterson from betraying his father's principles and taking the law into his own hands.  This notion of the sacrificial Negro, almost supernaturally virtuous, is central to the film's design.