THE PHENIX CITY STORY

(1955)

Starring Richard Kiley, John McIntyre, Kathryn Grant,Edward Andrews; dir: Phil Karlson 

The Phenix City Story shows a society at war with itself. Based as it is on actual events, the film is basically prevented from falling into stereotyped black-and-white polarities of good/evil, and its portrayals of the town’s warring factions leave neither side smelling rosy.

The baddies initially seem pretty cool, sexy and self-deprecatingly funny in the opening scene inside the notorious 14th Street epicenter of the trade which earned this Alabama town the nickname ‘Sin City’.

The goodies are starchy, uptight, white-picket-fence types - Mrs Patterson (Lenka Peterson) especially bears comparison with The Simpsons’ pursed-lipped Mrs Lovejoy - and their Lions Club-style cohort is quickly revealed to be a group of serial vigilantes (in the land where the Klu Klux Klan turned this into a local specialty).

There are old scores to settle and a seething vindictiveness in this basically sick society. So when we see the TWA Super Constellation airliner slowly descending from a high angle we know an avenging angel has come to Phenix City. Sticking to the facts, the film’s main protagonist is Army Major John Patterson, fresh from wrapping up his prosecution of war criminals in Nuremberg. It’s interesting in The Phenix City Story how steadily references to World War II recur, as the besieged townfolk long for a similar outcome in their struggle - no ‘postwar malaise’ here!

The film’s ‘based on the true story’ approach brings advantages (its gradual buildup shows characters’ strengths and weaknesses) and disadvantages (real life is not as smooth as a Hollywood script), but lends The Phenix City Story its own distinctive feel. The screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Out of the Past) has a sinewy muscularity to it that prevents the story ever sagging. Film allows meaning to be imposed on certain elements, such as the way the 14th St. honky-tonk is constantly returned to by the camera, giving it a totemic presence that grows increasingly more menacing as events unfold. When the National Guard rescuers arrive they are shown in medium shot as faceless enforcers in dark helmets, authoritarian drones as soulless as any contemporaneous 50s sci-fi like Body Snatchers. Jarring elements like this in the film reinforce the good/evil ambiguity established from the earliest scenes.

Another such is our hero’s (understandable) vow to avenge his father’s death at the hands of the mobsters in a vendetta every bit as ruthless as theirs. Of course sanity prevails and Patterson Jr.’s redemption from his own temporary surrender to the blood-rage infesting the town comes in the river, guided back to his senses by the black survivor of the film’s worst atrocity (the killing of a child) in a scene both clichéd and very powerful.

Seen half a century later, The Phenix City Story’s contrast to 1950s Leave It To Beaver-land is stark, but it’s an open question how much can be extrapolated to Eisenhower America. It’s much less of a stretch however to place it in the continuum of Southern redneck intolerance that stretches forward at least to In The Heat Of The Night (1967). Certainly the actual Phenix City citizens who are interviewed on the accompanying newsreel come from another planet.

(Exhibitor’s note: screen the newsreel last, as apart from its narcoleptic weirdness, it contains numerous spoilers.)

- Roger Westcombe

Recommended reading: This Will Happen To Your Kids Too, by Mark Bergman, Velvet Light Trap # 8 (reprinted in Kings of the Bs, Ed. Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, 1975)

Note: I've had numerous requests for this on DVD/VHS but ours is 16mm, and that's all she wrote - lobby your supplier!