Democracy in Action: “The Phenix City Story”
By all accounts, Phenix City, Alabama was a pleasant little town sitting just across the river from Columbia, Georgia. People were nice, it was a fine place to raise a family, it exemplified small town America. Then in the 1940s, perhaps smelling the untapped profit potential waiting in the nearby military base, The Syndicate moved in, opening an armload of casinos, bars, and whorehouses, as well as offering graft enough to insure the cops and community leaders would look the other way. Before long, Phenix City earned a reputation as the Sin City of the Southeast, drawing suckers and reprobates from all over the state. Sure, the cards were marked and the dice were loaded, but anyone who wanted to squawk about it was beaten until they didn’t feel like squawking anymore.
Things rolled along just fine that way until the mid-50s, when a lawyer named Albert Patterson and his son John, also a lawyer, decided it was time to clean things up. Too many people were being robbed, beaten and killed, and too many other good citizens of Phenix City were too scared to say anything. But in 1954 when Albert ran for and won the State Attorney General’s seat on a platform of rousting out the Syndicate, he was gunned down before he could take office. The assassination made national news, and while the trial was still underway in ‘55, Phil Karlson was in town with a film crew, determined to tell the whole sordid tale.
Using real people and real locations—a move that would be aped in subsequent years in films like The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery and In Cold Blood—gave Karlson’s docudrama a tangible realism and immediacy rarely seen before. The level of unflinching brutality (even breaking Hitchcock’s dictum about killing children) only drove the ugliness home a little harder. But there’s something else going on here, too, and I’m still not sure if Karlson was being cynical, being naive, or simply reflecting the disturbing mindset of the country at the time.
The film opens with a long pre-credit sequence designed to overemphasize its documentary intentions. Real-life Los Angeles TV reporter Clete Roberts (who would later go on to become a busy character actor specializing in “TV reporter” roles), stands in front of the actual courthouse where the actual trial was taking place, and announces that he came to “learn how the good people of Phenix City triumphed over evil and how democracy had finally asserted itself over a very real dictatorship.”
He then goes on to interview a string of actual Phenix City residents, many of them portrayed in the film, and many of whom seem to openly contradict what he’s just said by noting that the Syndicate was still around, still intact, and was in the process of reclaiming its old power and position.
Maybe in a move to distract viewers from that, the newsreel is followed by an opening crawl which claims the people had been under the “yoke of oppression” for almost 100 years, and that the film hoped to illustrate the power of the people united to prove that democracy works.
This, then, is followed by a bit of opening narration by John Patterson (Richard Kiley), who once again lays out the situation in Phenix City, claiming that vice had reigned supreme there for “almost fifty years.” (How long the Syndicate had been in control seems to be a point of some definite contention, though most histories trace it back about a decade before the assassination.)
Save for the small Southern town setting and the brutal violence, once the film finally gets underway the core story is fairly standard issue for the genre: an upstanding, morally-driven lawyer (in this case Patterson together with his father, played by John McIntire) goes head to head with the local mob boss even though the odds are firmly stacked against him.
Toward the end of the film following the assassination the townsfolk finally do come together. It’s not with a mind to peacefully go to the polls to illustrate the unbeatable strength of democracy by voting the gangsters and their cronies out of town. No,they form an angry mob with a mind to do some killing and burning of their own.
Although Patterson does stop them, he doesn’t stop them in order to encourage them to vote peacefully and prove democracy works, and he doesn’t stop them to offer the audience a satisfying man-to-man confrontation with the mob boss. No, he calms them down so he can call the governor and demand that the National Guard be mobilized and the town put under martial law. So instead of a brutal and steel-fisted gangster running the show, we have heavily armed government troops smashing up casinos, patrolling the streets, and imposing a curfew. Is there really much of a difference, except that the people are no longer allowed to drink, gamble, or whore under the latter? Under the Syndicate if you raised your voice and caused a ruckus about being scammed, or if you didn’t pay your debts on time, you’d be beaten or killed. In the strict new law and order town if you raised your voice or didn’t pay your debts, you’d be imprisoned, beaten, and quite possibly killed. Take your pick.
The film closes with Patterson (having assumed his father’s State Attorney General post) offering the audience an uplifting speech about the power of democracy to triumph over evil. But if you recall to the pre-credits interviews, many residents seem to believe the Syndicate hadn’t been broken, and that things would soon enough be back to the way they were. Which may say everything about democracy you really need to know.
In an interesting historical note, in 1958 the morally upstanding and kind-hearted John Patterson ran an openly racist campaign for governor, and won.
Meanwhile, nearly 20 years later Phil Karlson made another film based on actual events. Walking Tall told nearly the exact same story as Phenix City with a greatly increased level of violence. It was another big hit.
by Jim Knipfel