THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

Phil Karlson takes a huge chance in the opening reel of his based-on-fact crime drama by forefronting the fact. The Phenix City Story opens with its own newsreel; Clete Roberts (whom TV fans will remember playing himself interviewing members of the 4077th on M*A*S*H*) goes to the title town, where the story itself has been filmed on location, to interview some of the real people to be portrayed by actors later, including the widow of Albert Patterson, the candidate for Alabama attorney general who was assassinated on orders from the Phenix City vice syndicate. Conspicuously absent from this round of awkwardly authentic interviews is John Patterson, son of the martyred politician who by the time of filming had become attorney general in his own right. The dignity of his office may have kept the younger man from appearing in the show, but he may also have objected to some sensationalizing of his role in routing the racketeers. In any event, these first minutes are very dry, and have been cut out of some copies of the film. They may have seemed necessary because the story was so well-known nationally, having been covered in the leading magazines and by Pulitzer-winning reporters. The newsreel is Karlson's bona fides, an implicit endorsement by many of the participants in the story that the narrative that follows is essentially true.

After the opening credits come more buildup, now from a narrator who sets the scene. Phenix City is a border town linked to Georgia and Fort Benning by a bridge that brings servicemen to town and, in most cases, to the notorious red-light district along 14th Street, where vice is one of Alabama's biggest industries. After all the hype, one almost expects Phenix City to stand revealed as a bacchanal worthy of DeMille, or at least more Vegas-like than it proves. The reality, according to the movie, was cheaper, grittier, more tawdry overall: a mediocre chanteuse singing the "Phenix City Blues" with a jazz-band backup for a bunch of servicemen while the dice and card tables at the Poppy Club keep busy. This is the crime capital of the nation, "Sin City USA?" This certainly is the place: the film is shot largely if not entirely on location. And despite any initial disappointment at the scale or intensity of vice in Phenix City, the corruption and viciousness gradually grows on you.

The racketeers of 14th Street control law enforcement locally and have pull throughout the state. That means they can and do get away with murder thanks to cooperative or merely cowardly jurors. Old Albert Patterson (John McIntyre) knows the score and is just as reluctant from a pragmatic standpoint to work with the town's would-be reformers as he is from a moral standpoint to collaborate with the big boss, Rhett Tanner (Edward Andrews). His son John, just home from Europe and not necessarily eager to join his father's firm, proves less tolerant of conditions. Having dealt harshly with Nazis, John has little tolerance for Tanner's goons beating up respectable citizens or disgruntled gamblers. He wades in with his fists and finds allies in a Poppy Club patron whose girlfriend is a dealer there and a black janitor who saves John from an attack from behind by way of submitting his resignation. Whether John Patterson's crimefighting career started so dramatically or not, the film version gives Karlson a chance to film one of his patented brutal brawls with frame-shaking impacts and bodies practically falling into the first row of theater seats.

Antagonists: Rhett Tanner (Edward Andrews) makes an offer not to be refused; below, John Patterson (Richard Kiley) studies a fallen foe after a barroom brawl.

14th Street strikes back ruthlessly, first by kidnapping and killing the janitor, Zeke Ward's, daughter as punishment for him and a warning to John Patterson and his small children. Another Patterson ally gets his skull bashed in, but a jury decides that the victim somehow dashed his own brains out falling into a sawdust-covered, rock-free ditch.

The sight of a dead child is a particularly gruesome moment from Phenix City.

The jurors' disregard for the elder Patterson's proofs is the final straw for the old man. He's now convinced that the only way to break 14th Street is to take the reins of law enforcement at the state capital as attorney general. Some viewers may be confused by what follows, since his nomination seems to be equated with his election. Patterson is in fact running in the Democratic primary, which in the days of the "solid" segregationist South and a powerless Republican party was virtually the general election. Though Tanner's goons control the voting in Phenix City itself, beating the tar out of any opposition voters, they can't rig the whole state. Albert Patterson wins the primary and is deemed the "attorney general nominate," a counterpart to "attorney general elect" in other states. His victory gives 14th Street two options. They could throw all their resources behind a Republican candidate who presumably exists, or they can simply kill Patterson.

The Phenix City Story is a successful thriller because Karlson pulls off the great trick of first telling you exactly what will happen and then making the actual happening on film a matter of great suspense. Instead of resignation toward Albert Patterson's doom, the audience has been goaded and galvanized by Karlson's storytelling to root for the good guys to win. You want the old man not to be killed. At the same time, Karlson has told you that the story will end happily, that Phenix City has been cleaned up and 14th Street routed, yet the omnipotent violence of the Tanner gang and the pure inevitability of Albert's destruction leave you wondering how they could possibly lose. As it is, the end came less dramatically than portrayed here. We know that the governor declared martial law after Patterson's assassination, but in the film the arrival of the National Guard to shut down 14th Street looks like mere mopping up after John Patterson and Zeke Ward take justice, if not the law, into their own hands.

Apart from the scandalous history it recounts, Phenix City has a point to make about the rule of law. We're only twenty years but really a world away from the vigilante films of the Seventies set in similar locations, including some films also based on more or less real events. While those later films glorify the act of a citizen becoming judge and executioner, Karlson and writers Crane Wilbur and Daniel Mainwaring take every opportunity to repudiate vigilantism. We're told that vigilante tactics have been tried against 14th Street before, in vain; one can imagine Tanner's goons beating the krap out of the Klan back in the Twenties, if they didn't just co-opt the local klavern. Even on the night of his father's murder, John Patterson has the clarity of mind to talk a lynch mob out of sacking 14th Street, though he'll get to take some non-lethal vengeance on Tanner himself later that night. Zeke Ward has every reason to kill the man who murdered his daughter, but when his wife restrains him and reminds him of the commandment against killing he comes to his senses in time to talk Patteron out of killing Tanner. If you're accustomed to the vigilante style of the Seventies and after it can't help seeming to disappoint, even if you admit to yourself that the film is constrained by history. But the presumably fictional violence Karlson throws in at the end to please the crowd confuses the ultimate message. Did 14th Street fall because someone in authority finally stood up for law and justice, or because someone finally beat the shit out of the head gangster?

In retrospect, a reviewer might raise questions about the racial politics of the film. John Patterson looks like a racial progressive by association with Zeke Ward, but the real man as attorney general and later as governor proved a staunch supporter of segregation and an enemy of the civil rights movement, though the still-living Patterson caught up with the times enough to endorse Barack Obama for President in 2008. Karlson's film left me wondering how race factored into the real Phenix City story. In the film, Zeke Ward and his family are tokens, and we don't know whether other blacks partook in or benefited from vice, or whether any relation between blacks and organized vice influenced white citizens' view of 14th Street. These questions shouldn't color your final judgment of Phenix City as a film, but they're food for thought just the same.

On its own terms, The Phenix City Story works as a hard-hitting, convincingly brutal expose of the American underbelly. Its inclusion in the latest Warner Home Video Film Noir Classics collection (Vol. 5) is justified by the subject matter, if not by the entire checklist of noir archetypes, and by a successful exercise in night-shot noir by Harry Neumann on location in the actual town. On the acting side honors are shared by Richard Kiley's intense heroics and an unexpected, turn against type by perennial fuddy-duddy Edward Andrews as the casually vicious villain. Karlson's film is strong rabble-rousing stuff that'll get you mad, just as the writers and director intended. The compromises it makes at the end leave it a little short of classic stature, but it's certainly worth a look for any fan of American film from the Fifties.

COUNTRY BLUE (1973)

At first glance, this was one of the more enticing films in Mill Creek Entertainment's Drive-In Classics box set because it was one of the few titles in it to be letterboxed. But it's taken me a while to look at it because the subject matter sounded rather mundane. It's a once-in-a-lifetime triple threat performance by Jack Conrad, who wrote and directed the film and plays the lead role of Bobby Lee Dixon, a drifter out of jail on parole who comes back to his old haunt in Georgia near the Florida border and renews his romance with Ruthie (Rita George, who is profoundly misidentified by IMDB as a Berlin-born actress whose career began in 1919). Ruthie has been faithful to Bobby, but she's been faithful to her husband also, and that disappoints our hero, who was hoping she'd divorce the man we never see. We do get to see his trailer, where Ruthie and Bobby hold a tryst and Bobby expresses his disgust with a cramped small-town existence of grease-monkeying after just two days of freedom. He wants Ruthie to make a commitment to breaking out of their rut by joining him in robbing a bank in nearby Havana. That's pronounced "HAY-vana," by the way.

Country Blue is a movie with a split personality. For two-thirds of its present length it's a slow-paced atmospheric account of small-town Southern poverty with lots of Seventies details to hold my attention. It also gives us two young people taking up the ways of country bandits, but Conrad refrains from romanticizing their exploits. Their initial bank robbery is utterly inept, as Ruthie removes her mask almost immediately, Bobby constantly calls her by name, and she finally does the same for him. All the while a fast-talking bank president (David "the Big Lebowski" Huddleston) poor-mouths his own establishment to convince them that their haul from the tellers' cash drawers is all they're going to get. They leave with less than $2,000 when $40,000, they later learn, was within easy reach. When Bobby reads about it, he can't stand the humiliation, so he robs the bank again and gets the rest of the money. We can give him credit for perseverance, but little else apart from that Southern knack for driving fast and avoiding the police -- and even that fails our pair when they're stopped by a roadblock, chased down on foot and arrested. Up to this point I was debating whether Conrad meant us to see Bobby and Ruthie as pathetic small-timers or whether their ineptitude was really his as a writer-director. I'd decided on the former, in favor of Conrad, until the film's last half-hour, when it suddenly occurred to our auteur that he was supposed to be making an exploitation film for regional drive-ins, but hadn't really been doing much in that line yet apart from having Ruthie take her top off once.

So once we get our young lovers in prison the jailers set about beating the piss out of Bobby while Ruthie must endure the attentions of one or two lesbians in a cell. There's nothing explicit about that part and the lesbianism is all talk, and given the way the women look that's probably for the best. It's the thought that counts. Meanwhile, word of their imprisonment reaches Bobby's good friend Arneda Johnson, a local madam and bar owner in the black neighborhood. Bobby may be white trash, but he's no redneck if that means racism, apparently. Arneda comes to the rescue, visiting the jail with one of her employees in order to blackjack a jailer and free Bobby. Having also freed the less-lesbian of Ruthie's cellmates, the gang finds Ruthie being raped by the head jailer, to whom Bobby administers a sound thrashing. That done, the fugitives pile into a getaway car, only to have the jailers blast a big ol' hole in Ruthie's cellmate. Then Arneda's assistant goes down with a bullet in the head. In a panicky rage, Ruthie grabs a gun and blasts the head jailer (I should say blasts the jailer's head), then finally pushes the two corpses aside so she can close the car door and the survivors can escape. The escalation of brutality is so sudden that it really does seem like a different movie.

We have time for one more car chase and a fiery death for the pursuers, and from there it looks like Bobby, Ruthie and Arneda are in the clear. But this is the 1970s, when the deus ex machina is likely to stomp on a film's heroes like Monty Python's foot. In Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, for instance, the lovers are in the clear only to be annihilated by a train. In Country Blue one wrong turn sends our protagonists into the drink. In another era it might be a way of saying Crime Does Not Pay. But in the Seventies the message more often was Nothing Pays.

But this is not The End. Bobby escapes the watery grave, but the women don't. He limps back home for one final chat with his mentor Jumpy. You might think that Jumpy is the main character of the story, for Conrad generously gave top billing to the biggest name he could hire, longtime western character actor Dub Taylor, who had just done The Getaway and would follow this with a Love, American Style episode. Conrad's generosity didn't extend to a generous wardrobe budget; Taylor wears the same filthy Ex-Lax t-shirt through the entire picture, at home, at work, and at the race track. Jumpy advises Bobby that he's going to have to cope with adversity just like he did once (???), and so off the boy goes in a fresh vehicle. We see him heading down a road, and we see a police car turn a corner to follow him. We get one more shot of a lone car on the road, and the actors appear for the closing credits.

Country Blue is one of those films that makes a minor virtue of its impoverishment. Since poverty is its subject, it achieves authenticity negatively through lack of budget. Conrad found a good place to film in, and the broken-down locations give him all the art direction he needs. He's not a good writer nor a particularly good actor, but he seems right for his self-assigned role as a hapless self-pitying bandit. The main problem with the film is that he doesn't really strike a balance between the more character-driven first part of the film and the slam-bang crash-and-bleed final act. The more violent action shouldn't look like an afterthought the way it does here, where it has almost a square-up quality of compensating for a non-violent first hour. In Conrad's defense, I have to note that Mill Creek's copy of the film is about ten minutes short of its announced running time of 103 minutes, while IMDB claims that Country Blue was originally 110 minutes long. We may be missing footage that would have given the film a more consistent tone, but how likely is it that violent action scenes were cut out of this movie?

Overall, I found Country Blue interesting, if not exactly good, as an example of regional Seventies cinema that tried to say something about the environment it came from while trying at the same time to be a poor man's Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands. It has a historical value apart from its cinematic qualities, such as they are, that might make it worth a look for all-out Seventies buffs -- and the last half hour may make it worthwhile for fans of white-trash mayhem in general. It is definitely a more ambitious film than much of the stuff in Drive-In Classics, but I'd say that box set is probably where posterity would put it anyway.

THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960)

This particular review is in the way of a request. Sidney Lumet's film of Tennessee Williams's play Orpheus Descending was recommended to me by Crhymethinc, one of my oldest friends and a fellow movie fan whose opinions have appeared sporadically here and more often on The Think 3 Institute, my political blog. I hope he'll add his thoughts to our discussion of this film. Starting from a shared interest with me in cult cinema (he saw Goodbye Uncle Tom the same time I did for the first time, for instance), Crhymethinc has been moving toward a greater appreciation of Classic Hollywood. He enjoys outrageousness nearly as much as I do, and sometimes more so, but he ultimately holds movies to a literary standard: story counts the most. His blooming interest in Williams may be a way of having it both ways, combining strong literary credentials with often outrageous subject matter. He comes to this particular film, however, because of an additional interest in the career of Marlon Brando. Brando and Williams are a combination that happened only once before, and that was A Streetcar Named Desire, which should need no introduction here. But Fugitive Kind is not as well remembered, and was an unexpected flop with reviewers and public alike when it appeared. So what's the difference?

The first thing that struck me about this movie is that it's the last appearance of the archetypal young Brando: the sullen stud from Streetcar, The Wild One and (perhaps less sullenly) On the Waterfront. His pre-credits entrance into a police court to explain his arrest for disorderly conduct and plead for a chance to start fresh elsewhere promises a return to primal Brando after the accented extravagances of Teahouse of the August Moon, Sayonara and The Young Lions. It's a riveting scene in the reticent classical style, as it makes clear without stating explicitly that this would-be guitar hero has ended up playing a male prostitute in New Orleans, providing "entertainment" that doesn't require his musical instrument. Genuine shame combines with the usual instinct to sweet-talk the judge, and it works for the actor and the character, Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier, who's allowed to leave the mean old city and try his luck elsewhere. Brando works as well to leave you a little doubtful of Xavier's sincerity.

But Xavier is one of the "fugitive kind," a term only heard at the end of the film as a synonym for what the man himself describes as a sort of footless bird who floats through life and touches earth only to die. The emphasis on the fugitive-kind concept is a change from the classical symbolism that comes with the play's original title, and the movie title strikes me as being more appropriate to the story. "Orpheus Descending" implies that Xavier's arrival in a small Mississippi town is going to be like the mythological bard's trip to the netherworld, but the parallel is complicated by the availability of a number of Eurydices for our hero to choose from. There's Maureen Stapleton as the sheriff's wife, a would-be visionary painter. There's Joanne Woodward in crazy mode as the community's "lewd vagrant" who happens to know more about Xavier than he wanted. Most importantly, there's Anna Magnani as Lady Torrance, ambitious and frustrated wife of general store owner Jabe Torrance (Victory Jory), a mean old cancerous cripple who shares a guilty past with the sheriff. The men don't like the competition when the young stud blows in and almost unconsciously draws the women like a magnet.

Joanne Woodward is the nearest thing to comedy relief in The Fugitive Kind, whether she meant to be or not.

Something doesn't quite work here. Brando is still young and handsome enough to be plausible in this role, but his is a passive performance, and his talk about birds has primed us to think of Xavier as a transient who's ready to quit town at any moment. The actor labors under a huge handicap, as what we presume must be a big part of Xavier's appeal is unavailable to Brando: his music. The labors of Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph L. Mankiewicz in Guys & Dolls only barely concealed the brute fact that Brando had not a musical bone in his body, and in Fugitive Kind his character's one attempt at singing is dubbed by another actor. The cumulative effect is to confirm what the riff-raff of New Orleans believed; that Xavier's natural talent is purely physical and sensual, not artistic. I understand that the character gets to sing more in the play, as is only right with Orpheus in the title, and something is probably missing in the film when he doesn't, despite Williams's efforts as co-adaptor to make up the difference. The movie leaves you with the impression that Xavier's musical pretensions (his guitar autographed by blues legends is his most prized possession) are little more than a pose, and he can't help coming off as a bit of a loser as a result. There's nothing wrong with a loser as a protagonist, but it throws his appeal to the ladies into question. Crhymethinc, I think, was on the mark when he suggested that a darker Elvis Presley might have been ideal for this story.

But the story isn't about the power of music. More likely, it's about the impossibility of escape into any sort of rural idyll. If Xavier sees himself fleeing from the corruption of the big city, he finds at least as much corruption where he lands. The town is a depraved, racist patriarchy, where Lady's father was lynched because he dared sell alcohol to black people. She may have her problems with her husband, but at least he wasn't involved in that atrocity -- or was he? In any event, her revenge on the community is to build and run her own "confectionery" next door to her husband's shop. That project coincides with her simmering romance with Xavier, who initially goes to work as a shop clerk but becomes, resentfully, Lady's kept man. He's heading toward leaving when important revelations, including the full lit-up promise of the confectionery, convince him to commit himself to Lady. He touches earth -- mistake! But maybe he's only disproving the whole fugitive kind/footless bird concept and is acknowledging that he's just a man. The only one still talking about the fugitive kind at the end, after all, is a madwoman.

To state the obvious, Tennessee Williams is a theatrical writer. He is not a social realist. His characters are theatrical in all senses of the word; they self-dramatize and they speechify. This makes him a tough sell to some viewers, but used as I am to unconventional acting styles, the only jarring aspect of it all in The Fugitive Kind is the presence of unorthodox thespianism in what is clearly an A picture. The mighty Brando is mostly upstaged by the more flamboyant female characters: Stapleton's neurotic painter; Woodward's nutjob; and the patently tempestuous Magnani. She's a Williams veteran, having won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo, but apart from one reference to her as a "dago" you're left wondering whether Lady is supposed to be Italian or if this is some gigantic piece of miscasting. But I suppose she's not inappropriate for a character who has a sort of non-violent vendetta against the town fathers, and she has an impressive range of emotion from steely entrepreneurship to weepy despair under assault from an embittered Xavier. By comparison, Woodward, who won her Oscar playing schizo in The Three Faces of Eve, is a sort of specialty mad act, a pseudo-Eurydice who ends up more like the chorus of the tragedy.

It's up to Sidney Lumet to hold it all together. The man has a 50 year track record of quality from Twelve Angry Men to Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, and here he does a great job establishing the grungy setting of the town. This is a dirty film in the sense that it looks like everything needs a good sweeping and dusting. This is necessary to set up the contrast when Lady turns on the lights at the confectionery for the first time, turning it into a kind of fairy palace that finally bewitches Xavier. That in turn sets up the illusion-smashing brutality of the climax. Throughout the show, Boris Kaufman's cinematography is atmospheric and beautiful when it needs to be without being self-consciously arty, which would be wrong for the subject matter.

Lumet makes an arguably prophetic use of fire hoses as tools of oppression as Brando is victimized by villains who are firemen in something like the Fahrenheit 451 sense of the term.

Overall, the story seems compromised by Brando's limitations, but it's also sometimes enlivened by his strengths. His particular presence may throw the narrative out of balance, but The Fugitive Kind remains an intriguing balancing act as an attempt by Hollywood to come to grips with the scandal of the South. Landing somewhere between classic cinema and white-trash exploitation, it has ample material of interest to both camps.