The Phenix City Story (1955) Before you can get to the pulpy, blood-spattered chaos of this ripped-from-the-headlines noir, the movie makes you take your medicine.......
This involves a dreary, numbing 15 minutes of a pompous TV newsguy interviewing some of the actual participants connected to the events depicted in the film........
No offense to these nice decent folks, but they appear awkward and uncomfortable on camera......and the bloviating reporter never shuts up......it's a bore and nothing at all like the overheated, frenzied melodrama that it precedes......
But hang on, here comes the movie itself.......about a little Alabama burg ruled by a murderous syndicate who oversee crooked gambling dens to cheat the soldiers of a nearby Army base/.....
Anyone foolish enough to go up against them ends up beaten to jelly by their army of goons......or simply shot dead in the street.
Along comes two men courageous enough to take the crooks on......the father-son lawyer duo of Albert R. Patterson and John Patterson (John McIntire, Richard Kiley). The Pattersons pay dearly for it......and so does anyone who helps them.
A black janitor (the stalwart, iconic James Edwards) has his young daughter snatched off the street and murdered, her body hurled from a speeding car. And numerous other Phenix-ians, men, women and children, get beaten in broad daylight or bumped off altogether.......
This perpetual reign of carnage is ordered up and orchestrated by the town's crime boss, Rhett Tanner, played to oozing, fake-friendly perfection by Edward Andrews. Andrews, of course, spent decades as the acknowledged master of portraying pompous Chamber Of Commerce blowhards or similar authority figures, mostly to comedic effect.
But in this film, he turns that typical Hi-How-Are-Ya, handshaking character to the dark side.......and he's one cold, evil bastard to behold.
By the time this raw, ugly little movie grinds to a halt, Phenix City's literally a war zone, littered with corpses, taken over by the National Guard and put under martial law. I'm not sure whether this movie meant to leave its audience satisfied or just relieved it was over.
Either way it's riveting experience to sit through. 3 stars (***)......and decades later, director Phil Karlson once again got to rev up movie crowds with "Walking Tall", another blood-soaked crime and punishment true story.......(BQ promses to get to that one too)
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