The Phenix City Story

Before the opening credits of Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story, a 15-minute prologue follows a journalist as he interviews actual residents of the actual Phenix City, which establishes a documentary tone that enriches the film with a gritty realism like probably no other film noir. Phenix City, Alabama, was called “the wickedest city in America,” notorious for the gambling and prostitution rackets owned by its crime syndicate, and Karlson’s film dramatizes the real story of lawyer and DA candidate Al Patterson (John McIntire) and his son John (Richard Kiley), a military attorney recently returned from Germany, as they fight to cleanse the town of its criminal “filth.” Lenka Peterson plays John’s terrified yet resolute wife Mary Jo, and James Edwards plays Zeke, a tormented black laborer, husband, and father who provides last minute moral redemption. The film is harsh — men shot point blank, children hit by cars, a black little girl murdered, her corpse tossed from a car onto the Pattersons’ front lawn — and Karlson expends little visual gauze to pretty it up.