The Phenix City Story (Allied Artists). Long before the Civil War, Phenix City, Ala.—its name was Lively in those days—was known as the Sodom of the South. By 1941 it had grown into a "Sin City" of more than 15,000 permanent residents, almost all of them employed in the vice factories—gambling dens, brothels, dope parlors—that lined Phenix City's 14th and Dillingham Streets. By night the population doubled, and most of the steady customers came from Fort Benning, the U.S. Army's training camp across the Chattahoochee. When the boys didn't come to Sin City, the city went to the boys—in "mattress vans" that parked along the roads near camp.
Soon after World War II began, the backroom boys of Phenix City were counting their tainted blessings at the rate of $100 million a year; they had a good thing, and they meant to keep it. When church groups organized against them, the bosses simply bought themselves a quorum of elders. When good citizens tried to fight them at the polls, the bosses bought votes at $10 a head and put in a puppet government. Members of cleanup committees were subjected to a campaign of nuisance arrests and tire slashings. Two were badly beaten up, on a downtown street and in broad daylight, by hired bullies. In June 1954 Lawyer Albert Patterson, who had won nomination as Attorney General of Alabama on a cleanup ticket, was shot to death while sitting in his automobile just outside his office in the center of town.
That tore it. Alabama's Governor Gordon Persons was forced by public opinion to declare martial law. The National Guard took over. Phenix City was as dead as any 100-year-old harlot ought to be. During the next six months, a grand jury voted 741 indictments, including three for the murder of Lawyer Patterson. The accused: Chief Deputy Sheriff Albert Fuller, convicted as the triggerman, was sentenced to life in prison; County Solicitor Arch Ferrell was acquitted of complicity; Alabama's Attorney General Silas Garrett, still in office at the time of the murder, has not yet been brought to trial.
This is the sensational true story that The Phenix City Story tries to tell. The trouble is that in trying to handle their dramatic subject with a "documentary" technique the producers have come up with an overexcited document, and a drama that too often trickles away into the fine print. And yet Phenix City has the force of see-and-touch realism. The action was filmed among the same sallow bars, heat-shimmering sidewalks and deceptively innocent-looking back lots that watched it in the life. The actors try hard to weather naturally into the scene. Edward Andrews succeeds wonderfully: he hits the apogee of Southern villainy as he slomires agreeably about town, sweet-talking old ladies, flipping quarters like a slow jackpot, and looking all the while like a fat, greasy thumb that has been stuck too long in the pork barrel.