- The abridged version of The Phenix City Story is that Phenix City, Alabama is terrible in every possible way, both in real life and in fiction. As portrayed in Phil Karlson's documentary-style film, this diminutive municipality located near the Georgia border is a den of utter lawlessness. In the infamous "Poppy Club" on 14th Street, the band sings about how the city is known for its "fancy women, slot machines, and booze." Although many of the soldiers visiting from nearby Fort Benning appear to be having a good time, those that complain about the loaded dice or marked cards are beaten up and tossed out on the street, where the corrupt cops gladly haul them off.
- To hear the locals discuss it, this has been business-as-usual in Phenix City for the past 100 years. The local kingpin, a wonderfully charming and unassuming man named Tanner (Edward Andrews), drops in on a lawyer named Albert Patterson (John McIntire) just to make sure that he's not going to stir up any trouble, but Patterson assures him that he has no interest in acting either for or against the town's criminal element. The trouble is, Patterson's son John (Richard Kiley) has returned from military service in Germany, where he became accustomed to prosecuting war criminals. Having witnessed one of Tanner's thugs (John Larch) attack a pair of respectable townspeople (Biff McGuire, George Mitchell), John can't help but jump into the fray. After a few further acts of violence, even Albert Patterson is convinced to run for State Attorney General to combat Tanner and his powerful syndicate.
- The film's most harrowing moments surely involve those further acts of violence, which include the dynamiting of a family home, a child on a bike being run off the road, and, most notably, the murder of a young girl whose father (James Edwards) assisted John in a bar brawl. Which brings us to the most interesting aspect of The Phenix City Story. Despite its 13-minute newsreel prologue that features reporter Clete Roberts interviewing several of the film's real-life antecedents, the detail about the dead girl is completely fictional. Normally, this wouldn't be so bad - after all, everyone agrees that real murders, eventually including that of Albert Patterson himself, were committed in Phenix City. The issue is that the film's young girl and her father are black, whereas the real-life John Patterson went on to win the governorship of Alabama on a pro-segregation ticket. If anything, avenging the death of a black girl would have hurt his campaign! Somehow reality proves more awful than fiction in this otherwise incredibly compelling tale of the many ways that corruption can threaten democracy.
