Popular reviews

• 

  Review by russman ★★★ 4

  I didn't expect things to go smoothly in a city that can't spell "Phoenix" correctly

• 

  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★ 2

  2nd Phil Karlson (after Kansas City Confidential)

  Taking the legend ‘ripped from the headlines’ to a new level, Karlson’s retelling of a real-life assassination in an Alabama town is a relentlessly bleak piece of noir that sideswiped a vox pop documentary at an intersection. Shot on location (though whether it was shot in Phenix City I can’t say), it has a brutal urgency to its story of a DA whose promise of cleaning up the organised crime ring that ran the city on all levels led to his death. Closeups are tight and unsentimental, violence shockingly blunt for a film of the 50s. If it didn’t have a strange and unnecessary fifteen minute pre-credit documentary, this noir would be a…

• 

  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★ 1

  If you just pretend the red light district is Amazon then this movie has Perfect Politics™

• 

  Review by theironcupcake ★★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  "The law came to Phenix City at last. It took my father's death to bring it. It wasn't the kind of law my father fought and died for. But it was the only law the men who killed him could understand. The law with a loaded gun in its hand."

  Available on the same DVD as Dial 1119, the ripped-from-the-headlines feature The Phenix City Story dramatizes the true story of Albert L. "Pat" Patterson (portrayed here by John McIntire), a Democrat politician who was assassinated shortly after winning the election for Alabama Attorney General in 1954. His plan to reform the state's corruption was supposed to begin in the town of Phenix City, where gamblers and killers run rampant; Rhett…

• 

  Review by RetroHound ★★★½ 12

  Based on a true story, but departing from the truth in some places, The Phenix City Story tells of Phenix City, Alabama, where gambling and organized crime run the city. The city is right across the state border from Ft. Benning, Georgia so soldiers were always crossing the bridge to gamble and find women.

  Some people want the town cleaned up. A lawyer just out of the Army after prosecuting Nazis in Germany comes home to his father who's also a lawyer. Eventually, the older lawyer runs for State Attorney General on the basis of cleaning up Phenix City, is elected, and is killed before he can be sworn in.

  The version I watched had a little documentary at the…

• 

  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★

  Representing an intense and starkly realistic slice of film noir, The Phenix City Story portrays the real-life assassination of Albert Patterson together with the steadfast determination from his son in his attempts in thwarting the forces which operate the illegal enterprises in his small Southern town.  

  Albert Patterson had barely been nominated as the Democratic candidate for Alabama Attorney General when he was assassinated outside his law office on 18th June 1954 after campaigning on a policy of cleaning up the corruption in the city, and John McIntire gives a brilliant performance in the role which accentuates an authoritatively quiet nature. Edward Andrews gives a menacing portrayal as chief mobster Rhett Tanner and the production, which was shot almost…

• 

  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½ 2

  Between this movie, Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Combo, 1955 was the year that film noir embraced Jacobean drama as an inspiration; it speaks the language of howling, augmented melodrama in such a mannered, oblique, suggestive tone that it becomes Elizabethan poetry; It's even so surreptitiously self-aware that it seems to find room to comment in the diegesis about a modern viewer's antipathies - race relations, McCarthyism, Sgt Joe Friday, a Magic Negro (tm) ...all mixed into a stew where any element could pop up at any moment.

  (Tarantino voice): Crazy shit.

• 

  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½

  So basically Alabama was (and is?) an awful state for everyone, no matter your race?
  ----------------------

  This was a weird, but interesting, but also really weird film. Depending on the copy you have, there's like a 20 mins interview about the high raise on crime that was taking place on Alabama by that time. The thing is on one copy that I got this was played before even the whole Warner Brothers logo popped up, and the other one was after it played BUT before the whole opening of the movie itself. So you keep yourself wondering....

  In terms of the film itself, it was really good. The whole story felt like if Capra wrote To Kill A Mockingbird. There…

• 

  Review by Raphael Georg Klopper ★★★★

  When the law of men fails to attend its duty to all people, and becomes a manipulative source of power in corruptive hands, it turns into a sprawling disease inside the social dichotomy where the criminal imminent tragedy becomes the only reality destined to surround people's lives and well-being. The Noir here doesn't become exactly political, as often as it can be seen in so many other cases, while it may fit the description here, is rather more used just as a full immersion on what we know of unpunished justice and portray it exactly as it shows for the people who experience, and the real factual story that it seeks to depict.

  And through the documentation, Phil Karlson’s direction…

• 

  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★ 2

  "From the ashes of Phenix City has risen the symbol of democracy at work."

  One of those movies where, as the cliché goes, the city is the main character*, but combining that stereotype with the noir themes of dark alleys and seedy criminal underworlds to create an eloquent harmony of genre and content. Phenix City (no, I'm not spelling that wrong; yes, it's very hard to purposefully type it that way) is plagued with crime: generations of gangsters do everything from running illegal gambling houses to fixing local elections, and this situation has been going on for so long that not only has it become an accepted part of life, even the police have stopped trying to prosecute its perpetrators.…

• 

  Review by AntoniusBlock7 ★★★★

  “It just took something terrible to get people to wake up. And I think if the good people of America could take a lesson from this, they’d always be on the alert and go to the polls and vote, and do everything they can to make a good America.”

  It struck me as ironic that this story of events in Alabama in 1954 and the “yoke of oppression for the last one hundred years” is not that of Jim Crow or the segregation of schools that was coming to a bitterly fought ending, but I suppose that’s another matter.

  What the film is about is the widespread corruption and vice in Phenix City, where organized crime ran casinos and prostitution…

• 

  Review by Channing Pomeroy ★★★★

  Tolstoy said that art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another. If Tolstoy is correct, then The Phenix City Story is pure art. In the movie’s most famous shot, an innocent girl is tossed dead from a moving car as a warning to the citizens of the town. I became so emotional watching this this scene on a plane that a flight attendant asked me if I was ok.

  But then there follows what must be the harshest depiction of the inhumanity of racism ever committed to film. A deputy calls another officer and says — in a matter of fact, annoyed tone, as if he’d been called about a cat stuck in a tree — “Someone…