Ben's Top Pick for May - The Phenix City Story (1955) - airing May 10th

The Phenix City Story is a layered picture, part 1950s film noir crime thriller, part docudrama and part American history lesson. Set in 1954, it tells the true story of the assassination of the man who'd just won the Democratic nomination to become Alabama's Attorney General, Albert Patterson, murdered as he walked from his office to his car one June night.

Patterson had run an aggressive anti-corruption campaign focused on organized crime in his hometown, Phenix City, which had come to be known as "the wickedest city in America." Not Vegas. Not New Orleans. Phenix City, Alabama.

There's a nightclub scene early in the film, where the band belts out the chorus to a catchy song, a ditty that could well be the city's anthem, "fancy women, slot machines and blues," they sing. If that were the whole truth, Phenix City might sound appealing to some (OK, to me). But its vice (women, gambling and drugs) thrived thanks to a climate of violent intimidation, ultimately leading to Patterson's murder--an act so desperate it finally forced the Governor's hand, and he sent the National Guard to Phenix City to impose martial law.

Phil Karlson, who specialized in noirs, directs with a docudrama style. But just when you feel as if you might be watching a police procedural, Karlson turns it left, into a morality tale, where good, God-fearing men crusade against mob-backed sin. Then, just when the film might get too preachy, Karlson goes right, exposing us to the terrifying violence the mob used to silence anyone standing in its way.

A word of warning about the violence--this is a bloody film, a film where innocents are murdered. It's alarming and shocking and not at all commonplace for a film made in 1955. But it's not gratuitous. Rather, it lends a sobering degree of realism to Karlson's enormously watchable film.

by Ben Mankiewicz