The Phenix City Story (1955)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) While The Phenix City Story often gets lumped, with some justification, in the big film noir category, it’s aiming in a slightly different direction than many of its contemporaries. Inspired by a real story, it’s about wide-scale corruption, both in terms of a city catering to vice and having a leadership associated with crime. While Phenix City is now a small and sleepy town of roughly 39,000, it was known as a den of perdition in the 1940s and 1950s—its proximity to Columbus across state lines, and Fort Benning to the south really not helping. The film often takes a quasi-documentary, quasi-moralistic tone in pushing its story forward, and greatly benefits from on-location shooting at a time when crime was a pervasive problem. It’s all the more amazing that the film openly discusses the corruption of the local government, an organized problem so severe that not all the characters survive to the end. As such, director Phil Karlson’s style approaching fact-based cinema-verité doesn’t always make it a prototypical noir: There is no strong central female character, for instance, and the cruel nature of the historical events described here defied a tidy resolution. (Which didn’t stop Hollywood filmmakers, as they imposed a closure on the film that never happened in reality.)  But what it may lack in genre drama, The Phenix Story makes up in almost documenting a social issue. Some versions of the film (such as the one shown on TCM’s Noir Alley) begin with an impassioned address to the viewers telling them that what they’re about to see is real and dangerous. Using real locations (and local actors) gives an atmosphere that the film would have never matched had it been shot entirely on soundstages. It also allows it more freedom to show things that weren’t all that common in studio films at the time, cutting across depictions of race and violence in a much blunter way. The result may not be purely likable, but it’s interesting and stretches the definition of film noir.