The Phenix City Story (1955) dir. Phil Karlson
Starring: John McIntire, Richard Kiley, Kathryn Grant, Edward Andrews, Jean Carson and John Larch

****

By Greg Klymkiw

“Somebody just threw a dead nigger kid on Patterson’s lawn. Go out and have a look.” Uttered with a chilling matter-of-fact timbre and an unmistakably Alabamian accent, a fat, sweaty, cigar-puffing dispatcher barks out this line in a dank, dirty and humid police station thick with smoke and the overwhelming karma of human rights violations. It occurs on the heels of the sickening, unforgettable image of a child's battered, bloodied body as it's flung like a rag doll from a passing vehicle and virtually into our laps via a creepy low-angle pull-back.

Without a doubt, this is one of the most brutal and hard-hitting film noir pictures you’re likely to see in your lifetime..

The movie is The Phenix City Story.

And it’s a great movie!

Not only is The Phenix City Story one of the best crime pictures ever made, but feels like it hasn't dated one bit (save for the period in which it's set). The filmmaking seems as fresh and vital as when it first puked up the grotesque reality of the deep American south upon its release in 1955. That said, a number of its techniques may seem familiar to many, but keep in mind - they began here, folks.

Ace crime director Phil (Kansas City Confidential, Framed, Walking Tall) Karlson, working from a sizzling screenplay by Daniel (Out of the Past) Mainwaring and Crane (Andre De Toth's Crime Wave) Wilbur, delivers a picture that gets so under your skin it demands multiple viewings - each more aesthetically exciting and thought-provoking than the last. Karlson's command of cinematic grammar is so sharp and astute that he's able to frame his work within a structure that breaks quite a few rules by always knowing what the rules are and using them when he needs to and flouting them when he wants to shove our faces ever-deeper into the mire.

Phenix City, Alabama is a real place. Bordering the state of Georgia where the mighty Chattahoochee River (one of the locations used for the movie Deliverance) slices through it, Phenix City in recent years has become known as one of the best places in America to raise a family.

It wasn't always this way.

And frankly, I find it hard to believe it's changed all that much. My few visits and albeit limited exposure to that “Great State” suggest that Alabama is one of the nastiest, weirdest, most dangerous and distressingly prejudice-ridden places I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing.

Historically, Phenix City was the site of one of the last big battles of the Civil War and during the 1940s and 50s, it became known as Sin City, USA. On a per capita basis, there was more crime (much of it violent) in this mini-metropolis, than any other region in America. Corruption ran rampant as did gambling houses, prostitution and murder.

Situated near the military training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia, Phenix City was the go-to location for America's fine military to indulge in all manner of debauchery. The American military has always and continues to be one of the largest consumers of prostitutes world wide. Throughout the 20th century and beyond, Uncle Sam’s protectors, due to their gluttonous appetite for no-strings-attached stress-relief have, in a sense, been primarily responsible for the sexual slavery and exploitation of women the world over. (A prime example is the Eastern European sex-slave-trade that exploded during America's involvement in the post-Milosevic struggles in Croatia and detailed in the new feature film The Whistleblower directed by Larysa Kondracki and starring Keira Knightley.)

During the 1950s, Phenix City, thanks mostly to the avid consumption of sexual favours, had the highest rate of venereal disease during WWII and in the post-war period. When off-site furloughs were unavailable, the army allowed truckloads of prostitutes to be brought right into Fort Benning to service the randy recruits. It has oft been rumoured that famed General Patton's death was actually rigged by organized crime since he threatened to clean things up when Fort Benning was under his command.

God Bless America! And the United Nations, of course - as both continue to disgustingly support sex slavery to keep the boys happy in the Middle East.

And, God Bless Phil Karlson - for real! One of America's great movie directors, Karlson chose a blend of docudrama, neo-realism and film noir to tell the story of the late Albert Patterson (brilliantly played in the picture by John McIntire), a lawyer who ran for the State Attorney General position on a major anti-crime-and-corruption ticket and was brutally and brazenly gunned down by the criminal mob running Phenix City.

The story begins with a benign Patterson, trying to live his life quietly. When Albert's son John (Richard Kiley, displaying his almost trademark, and here effective, moral outrage) returns home for a visit and discovers how corrupt things are, he decides to stay and fight the good fight. Albert joins the fight and agrees to run for Senator. Albert's old friend Rhett Tanner (a delectable performance from Edward Andrews - alternately next-door-neighbour friendly and malevolently smarmy), attempts to convince Albert to back down. When he doesn't the violence escalates to such extremes that men who believe in the law are faced with taking the law into their own hands.

Writing in his book Essential Cinema, one of the few great living film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum addresses not only the potential for vigilantism in the story itself, but the sort of audience reaction garnered by The Phenix City Story:

"Though the movie's politics are liberal, its moral outrage is so intense you may come out of it wanting to join a lynch mob."

One of the more interesting thoughts that Rosenbaum's quote elicits is the different ways in which similar true-life situations were treated in the 50s and 70s - especially by director Phil Karlson himself. With The Phenix City Story Karlson creates the desire to "join a lynch mob", yet does so within a story wherein the central figures never quite get to that point and use "the law" to primarily battle the corruption.

In the 70s, Karlson revisited a similar tale - that of Sheriff Buford Pusser in the huge vigilante boxoffice hit Walking Tall. Not only did audiences all over the world want to join lynch mobs (I remember the trailers and TV ads featuring footage of audiences leaping out of their seats and delivering standing ovations at the end of the film), the story Karlson chose to tell was an out and out pro-vigilante tome where its central figure walked softly, literally carried a big stick and used it with abandon. Walking Tall bears all the hallmarks of Karlson's terse, effective direction and manipulation of audience emotion, but does so by going all out in celebrating the notion of taking the law into one's own hands.

Another interesting observation is just how similar the story elements are in The Phenix City Story and Walking Tall. Both films feature the following:

- A young man returns to his hometown to discover it is a den of iniquity and decides to fight back.

- An inveterate gambler wins fair and square, but upon exposing cheating in the gambling club, is beaten to death. This is almost a replay of Walking Tall's opening with the character of Lutie McVey played by Ed Call.

- The primary location of vice in both films is presided over by a butch bull dyke (played by Jean Carson as "Cassie" and Rosemary Murphy as "Callie" respectively).

- The good guys are secretly aided by a hooker with a heart of gold (played by Kathryn Grant and Brenda Benet respectively).

- The good guys are aided by a Black man (played by James Edwards and Felton Perry respectively).

- The Albert Patterson character is similar to that of Pa Pusser played by Noah Beery Jr. in the latter picture.

Looking at both films it's obvious Karlson ordered Walking Tall's primary scenarist Mort Briskin to use Phenix City Story as a model.

One also cannot help but notice that Roger Corman must have taken a cue from Karlson's 1955 true-life depiction of crime and racism in the deep South when he adapted Charles Beaumont's book The Intruder in 1962. Corman shot his thriller dealing with racial integration in education on location in the towns hardest hit with the controversy. Karlson, of course, entered the territory first with his film.

Though in fairness, thanks to producer Mark Hellinger with the much earlier Naked City, noir and the crime genres during the post-war period were both highly influenced by the neorealist movement in Italy and led the charge for a whole new era of location shooting in American cinema.

Stylistically bold and downright daring in the myriad of chances it takes, The Phenix City Story begins with a series of interviews with actual citizens of Sin City, USA - major players in the real-life fight against the criminal element, some of whom admit to the camera that they have been the targets of harassment and death threats. These interviews are shot in the very locations in which the events took place - so real that we see people wandering in and out of the background - REAL PEOPLE - briefly looking at the cameras and/or quickly averting their gaze so as not to be caught on film.

In fact, if we didn't know going in that we were soon going to be seeing a dramatic recreation of the events, we might, during this lengthy pre-title interview sequence think the film was going to be a documentary. It's not, of course, but once Karlson begins the story proper, and shoots his tale on the very street where the Sin City crimes took place and goes so far as to have lead actor John McIntire costumed in the very suit that real-life Albert Patterson was murdered in, we're utterly mesmerized by this strange hybrid of docudrama and neo-realism - thus confirming that what we're watching is a movie that's going to be like no other we've seen.

The Phenix City Story is part of Volume 5 of the continuing series of Warner Home Entertainment box sets The Film Noir Classic Collection - perhaps one of the worthiest DVD boxes one is likely to own.

Dark Alibi (1946) dir. Phil Karlson
Starring: Sidney Toler, Mantan Moreland, Benson Fong, Ben Carter and Teala Loring

***

By Greg Klymkiw

When 20th Century Fox finally decided to give the Charlie Chan series a rest after several years of excellent product (second features with Grade A treatment), the stalwart poverty row company Monogram Pictures grabbed the franchise's torch and generated a series of ultra-low budget Chan adventures. While there isn't a single Monogram Chan that comes close to the even the most run-of-the-mill Fox productions, I still and will always have a special place in my heart for them. A good part of this fondness might well derive from extremely early childhood memories. For whatever reason, it was the Monogram Chans that played endlessly on the bottom dwelling independent American TV station KCND in Pembina, North Dakota that beamed its wonderful signal into Winnipeg to save us from the mostly execrable two Canadian TV stations we received locally. I didn't actually see the Fox Chans until my early teenage years and by then, the Monograms were firmly entrenched within my movie-absorbent brain and the memories, even then, were always warm and fuzzy.

Looking at the Monograms now, I still love them for the aesthetic elements that comprise virtually every picture in their Chan canon. The stock footage for establishing shots, the perfunctory sets, the small number of interior locations with scenes stretched beyond the limit to keep camera and lighting set-ups to a minimum, the lack of any A-list talent on camera (but some very fine character actors in support) and the clearly sub-par writing; all contribute immeasurably to my enjoyment of them. Not that I laugh derisively or take "guilty" pleasure in seeing Grade-Z production values, but rather, I enjoy them the same way one enjoys comfy old slippers long past their age of, shall we say, freshness.

Call them, if you will, the Kraft Dinner Chans.

Most of these pictures retained the services of Sidney Toler (who so expertly took over the role at Fox from Warner Oland and eventually made it exclusively his own) and when Toler was clearly unable to continue due to cancer, Roland Winters took over for six pictures and while not up to Toler and Oland, at least delivered the strangest interpretation of Chan ever set forth on celluloid.

Dark Alibi is one of the very best Monogram productions. In this episode of the franchise, the venerable sleuth of the Asian persuasion coincidentally happens to be leaving the office of an old pal, a public defender who is assailed by the desperate daughter of an innocent man on death row. What's a Chan to do? Well, of course he needs to help the young lass out. And so begins a race against time as Chuckles needs to save the woman's father AND find the real killer. Chan's theory is that someone has figured out how to forge fingerprints. No mean feat. Will Chan do it? You bet he Chan!!! (Kind of like "Bob the Builder" - YES HE CAN!!!)

Several elements are at play in making this the best Monogram Chan.

First and foremost is the fine direction of Phil Karlson who spent many of his early years toiling in the trenches of Monogram and other Poverty Row studios - delivering genre pictures that were always a cut above the rest. In the 50s, Karlson would go on to direct some of the finest noir crime thrillers ever made - most notably The Phenix City Story, Kansas City Confidential, Scandal Sheet and the especially harrowing 99 River Street. In the 60s he made one of Elvis Presley's best, Kid Galahad, and the following decade he made the great 70s noir Framed and one of the biggest vigilante pictures of all time, the original Walking Tall.

With Dark Alibi, Karlson outdoes himself within the typical Monogram constraints. The numerous dialogue scenes, which in many other hands would have been mind-numbingly dull, are rendered with efficiency and style. Karlson's wide and medium compositions are especially well framed and his blocking is always lively and he keeps the dialogue brisk and crackling. He even manages to pull off two first-rate set-pieces; the opening heist with lots of shadow and key light and a terrific sequence involving an eerie, well-stocked theatricasl supply warehouse. There's also a rip snorting prison shootout which is a definite rarity in Chan mysteries and as such is a welcome bonus.

Secondly, the film has a great sense of humour. The comic rapport between Mantan Moreland (playing Birmingham Brown, Chan's loyal driver and manservant) and Chan's Number Three son, Tommy (Benson Fong) is always lively. The two actors clearly had fun playing off each other and by extension, we enjoy it also. Their routines vary from utterly insane conversations punctuated with Chan's deadpan disapproval of their laziness to the two of them getting into a variety of sticky wickets by ignoring Chan's orders for them to sit still. Moreland, the chubby, almost cherubic African-American comedian with bulging pop-eyes gets to play a few scenes with his equally brilliant straight man Benjamin Brown. Their unfinished sentence routines are especially brilliant displays of coming timing and wisely, Karlson shoots them in a simple medium proscenium which is instinctively the right thing to do, but also a nod to the vaudeville style of their gags.

And on the humour front, no Chan picture can be without the hilarious aphorisms spouted by the wise Asian detective. Dark Alibi is full of them. Some of my favourites in the picture include:

"Ancient proverb say: One small wind can raise much dust."

"Honorable grandmother always say: Do not think of future - it come too soon."

"Remember old saying: Earthquake may shatter the rock, but sand upon which rock stood still right there in same old place."

"Skeletons in closets always speak loudest to police."

"Ugliest trade sometimes have moment of joy. Even gravedigger know some people for whom he would do his work with extreme pleasure."

Of course, all of the above are delivered by Toler with a straight face and full portent in his voice, while with others, one catches that tell-tale Toler eye-twinkle. In either case, they're always knee-slappers.

Chan's witty aphorisms and the antics of Mantan Moreland and Number Three Son are often cited, wrongly, as racist. Uh, this is the 40s. It's a different time and place and as such, reflects said time and place. If one responds positively to the Chan series at all, it seems impossible to me how anyone could take serious exception to any of Chan's aphorisms, his son's laziness and Moreland's hilarious antics and line-readings. If anything, one could charge the films with being ethnocentric, but there is none of the implied hatred inherent in the humour that seems to be a necessary ingredient to label something as racist. The humour is gentle and, in its own cockeyed way, rather respectful of Asian and African-American culture. Moreland in particular is a great comic actor - truly great! Denigrating his style of humour by contemporary standards of political correctness frankly detracts from acknowledging his comic genius. That, for me, is far more offensive than any stereotypes Moreland propagates.

Finally, the third element contributing to the picture's lofty position at the top of the Monogram Chan heap is that the script, while hardly a work of genius, delivers a decent mystery with a genuinely surprising conclusion. It also features the aforementioned fingerprint forgery idea which, as ludicrous as it sounds, actually works in a relatively convincing fashion. It is also endowed with a race-against-time structure that definitely heightens the suspense.

Dark Alibi is a solid Monogram Picture, indeed, and an excellent addition to the studio's contribution to the cinematic Chan canon.

Dark Alibi is part of a four film box set from TCM via Warner Home Entertainment. A wise programming choice was to include Toler's last and Winter's first renderings of the role. The transfers are all decent, but one wonders why so much money was lavished on the handsome packaging of the films in a nice cardboard box with great graphics and no effort put into the uninspired menus and lack of decent extras.