MAD-MAN

Kicking Shyster's Arses Is A Laudable Life's Work!

16 January 2012

THE PHENIX CITY STORY(1955)AND MY DAD

Thanks to the Pacific Film Archive(PFA)classroom-style theater auditorium on Cal campus in the Berkeley BOG, I was privileged to reunite with my beloved dead dad at the movies--at least for a few brief moments on at least some semblance of a silver screen--for the very first time since his passing, Monday the 1st of November 1971. Born the 3rd of September 1920 he died at just 51.



At the time of my birth both of my parents were rather successful itinerant entertainers performing on the road all over the so-called Deep South. Dad was a talented 33-year-old trumpet player extraordinaire, Mom a 21-year-old combination singer, stripper and "B-girl" whom one Atlanta newspaper club reviewer compared to actress, Lana Turner.



By the start of the 1970s many if not most real career musicians(and their music)were reduced to disuse by the loud fake fad noise of rock & roll, and Dad was one of those countless casualties, dying an alcoholic taxicab "Hackney Carriage Driver"(License No. 7741)in his own birthplace of Boston("Beantown"), Massachusetts.



Friday night though the PFA replayed some 54 years later one special shining moment my dapper Dad enjoyed by appearing briefly but prominently with his own jazz band combo in the opening scenes of The Phenix City Story(1955), a black-and-white biopic film noir directed by Phil Karlson, screening at 8:15pm the 19th of June 2009!



Dressed in a casual, untucked, squared sportshirt--together with his band combo--Dad enthusiastically shares the screen lip-syncing in the film's provocative opening sequence with busty and sexy pinup model and actress/singer, Meg Myles, performing her sensational musical number singing Harold Spina's "Phenix City Blues!" At one point Dad and his band get a full-frame shot to themselves--even though their actual music is dubbed over.



Inside if not out aloud I was all smiles clapping and cheering for Dad!



This crime drama--filmed on location in semi-documentary style--depicts the real-life assassination of reform-minded Alabama attorney general-elect, Albert L Patterson, gunned down outside his office the 18th of June 1954 in corrupt Phenix City, Alabama, a city in Russell county controlled by organized crime and subsequently placed under limited martial law.



Because of the way it exploits the utter ruthlessness of the murderous syndicate gangsters, and manipulates audience reaction to gravitate toward vigilante mob mentality, the film could be called the proverbial emotionally-charged, hard-hitting crime melodrama. At several points in the story I was wishing myself that Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" would suddenly show up with his deadly accurate .44 Magnum six-shooter to come help out these severely victimized local yokels!



In the end though it was rather difficult for me to work up too much animosity for even the most wicked and vicious of the supposed "bad guys" since the topnotch cast was populated by so many familiar and frequently friendly faces immediately recognizable from classic "golden age" '60s TV serial programs, which I grew up with during my most formative years.



Veteran Massachusetts-born film and television actor John Larch, who spouts the most horrendous Southern accent playing tough guy hoodlum Clem Wilson, would appear later on in three episodes of the classic Twilight Zone TV series, most notably perhaps as Bill Mumy's father in "It's A Good Life"(1961). REAL good--for those of you who remember that especially memorable episode! An old friend of Clint Eastwood he'd play cops in 1971 in both Play Misty For Me(as Sgt. McCallum)and Dirty Harry(as the Chief).



Portly veteran character actor Edward Andrews, who plays cutthroat syndicate crime boss Rhett Tanner, and proves expertly adept at coming off as both benign and malign in the very same malevolent breath, appears likewise in two classic Twilight Zone episodes, most notably perhaps in You Drive(1964)as Oliver Pope, an besieged business executive haunted for a hit-and-run by a relentless Christine-type automobile!



For me Andrews' best and most impressive scene in the entire flick--only his second film project to date--is the lengthy conversation he has in the law office of martyred crusader-to-be, Albert L Patterson(played by veteran western character, John McIntire, who like Andrews could play sympathetic and sinister with equal aplomb), hamming it up being amiable, ominous and menacing in one fell swoop. In the classic Twilight Zone episode the Chaser(1960)McIntire himself plays none other than Professor A "Daemon."



"I always figure any fool can learn lines, but what they pay you for is to say 'em better than anybody else can say 'em," Andrews has been quoted as saying. And I've absolutely no doubt whatever that nobody could've said his Phenix City Story lines better or more spine-chillingly than he did!



Playing another of the flick's innocent martyrs, Ellie Rhodes, is fresh-, sweet-faced Kathryn Grant--two years before becoming Mrs. Bing Crosby and three years before becoming part of cult fantasy film history playing Princess Parisa in the magnificent and magical 7th Voyage of Sinbad(1958), starring Kerwin Mathews in the title role.



Lenka Peterson is excellent as Mary Jo Patterson, the emotionally distraught and hysterical wife of crusading son John Patterson, played with earnest conviction by actor Richard Kiley, whom this film really belongs to.



Where this flick really goes South--and far deeper than even the deepest Deep South--is toward its melodramatic river-splashing grand finale when Richard Kiley(as son John Patterson)is about to put Edward Andrews(as Rhett Tanner)down for the count, plunging his depraved head underwater to drown him like a dog for ordering the shooting his of his father, John McIntire(as Albert L Patterson). "Drown the pig!" I jokingly cheered myself.



But then jumps in meddling Zeke Ward(played by James Edwards), whose own baby little girl was horribly murdered by the local Alabama mob, passionately persuading John Patterson that meting out self-righteous vigilante justice isn't really the answer in the end.



James Edwards, you see, was a pioneering BLACK actor playing admirable, honorable and respectable BLACK characters--without ever once touting his blackness--long before the likes of Jamie Foxx and Denzel Washington appeared on the scene, following on his coattails attempting to publicly preen theirs. Personally I remembered Edwards more for appearing as the scrawny Nagasu witch doctor, Futa, in Tarzan's Fight For Life(1958), starring Gordon Scott in the title role, as well as Cpl. Allen Melvin in the Manchurian Candidate(1962).



At that climactic point in the flick I was soundly surprised the entire witlessly unthinking politically correct contingent amongst the audience didn't break out in song chanting in unison Ol' Man River from the musical play, Show Boat!



But that cornball ending, so absurdly ludicrous, so ridiculously absurd, motivates me to at least research further what really transpired in the end for my birth town!



Barely half a year before I was born in Phenix City the 24th of January 1954. Throughout these precarious proceedings my dear Dad played his regular musical gig at a certain "Beechie's Club"(named in box 11b.on my official Alabama birth certificate beneath the heading, "Kind of Business or Industry"), owned and run by famed "Ma Beachie"(born Beachie H Parr, 19 March 1891), who makes a cameo appearance in the town's namesake film during a streetside exchange with actor Edward Andrews, playing ruthless crime syndicate boss, Rhett Tanner. Presumably the "Poppy" club--location of the film's major action scenes--is modeled after Ma Beachie's own scandalous gambling-and-prostitution bar of ill repute. Sometimes I feel it's a wonder our fledgling family made it out of Dodge alive.



"Phenix City, Alabama, a.k.a. 'Sin City, U.S.A.," read Juliet Clark's film notes, "became nationally notorious in 1954 when the good-ol'-boy gangsters who ran the town's vice rackets conspired to murder Albert Patterson, a local lawyer who'd just been elected Alabama's attorney general. Filmed on location while the murder trial was still in progress, Karlson's raw report opens with newsreel footage of journalist Clete Roberts interviewing townspeople involved in the events. The drama that follows, co-written by Daniel Mainwaring(Invasion of the Body Snatchers), mixes actors with real-life residents and facts with invented incidents in a shockingly detailed depiction of depravity and corruption. With a text declaring 'Phenix City is now a model community,' the movie officially celebrates the ultimate arrival of law and order, but its images acknowledge a darker undertow. As critic and Alabama native Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, 'though the movie's politics are liberal, its moral outrage is so intense you may come out of it wanting to join a lynch mob.'"



If there's something I can't stand it's self-inflicted ignorance in the form of poorly researched movie reviews. Good-ol'-boy gangsters? That's a laugh. According to the Mark Gribben's"Fall and Rise of Phenix City," the actual mobsters calling all the behind-the-scenes shots in that town--both figuratively and literally--sported familiar mob names like Frank Costello, Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante.



Most amusing of all, Albert L Patterson's son, John, "took his father's place on the ballot in 1954 and was elected Attorney General. In 1958 he was elected Governor of Alabama. A strict SEGREGATIONIST, he banned any marching bands from black high schools from participating in the festivities surrounding his inauguration." Ungrateful bastard, poor Zeke Ward must've thought in retrospect, after preventing John from committing cold-blooded, vigilante murder! I can't help but wonder whether actor Richard Kiley resembled John Patterson in the least. John McIntire certainly looked like Albert Patterson.



If there exists today a modern-day "good-ol'-boy' network it's the tyrannical, witlessly unthinking thought-control police otherwise known as the politically correct. As my own book, Sexcapades by the Decades: The Twenties(2007), puts it:



"Today the witlessly unthinking politically correct
proponents incessantly--and irritatingly--persist
in their stupid attempts to co-opt or otherwise rip off as
their own supremely apathetic and comatose generation's,
all the most positive progress in inter-racial relations
actually pioneered and promoted long since by far
hipper and cooler generations of youth in times past!"



Which explains why any independent, "alternative"(to what it's never quite clear), free-thinking, free-speech publication in the supposed free speech capital of the planet, Berkeley, would outright CENSOR(oh, excuse me, "edit")any satirical reference I'd make dubbing Berkeley the BOG! In Berkeley, you see, your speech is truly free only so long as it chimes in with the politically correct party line of indoctrination and thought control—so supremelyTERRIFIED of true critical thought are the Bog's poltically correct!



For more about that check out my title, BERKELEY BASHED: Victim's Guide to the Backward, Barbaric, Butt-UGLY BOG(2005).
 http://www.amazon.com/Berkeley-Bashed-Backward-Barbaric-Butt-Ugly/dp/0943283116/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326725386&sr=1-11



For the town's definitive history readThe Tragedy and the Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama by Margaret Anne Barnes.



Other movie reviews posted include:



"In a style of dramatic documentation that is as sharp and sure as was that of On the Waterfront or, for a more appropriate comparison, that of the memorable All the King's Men--scriptwriters Crane Wilbur and Dan Mainwaring and director Phil Karlson expose the raw tissue of corruption and terrorism in an American city that is steeped in vice. They catch in slashing, searching glimpses the shrewd chicanery of evil men, the callousness and baseness of their puppets and the dread and silence of local citizens. And, through a series of excellent performances, topped by that of John McIntyre as the eventually martyred crusader, they show the sinew and the bone of those who strive for decent things," wrote New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther.



"One of the most violent and realistic crime films of the 1950s, The Phenix City Story pulses with the bracing energy of actual life captured on the screen in its establishing shots and key scenes, and punctuates that background with explosively filmed action scenes. Director Phil Karlson showed just how good he was at merging well-told screen drama with vivid verisimilitude, and leaving no seams to show where they joined. Filmed on location in Alabama with a documentary-like look, the movie captured the ambiance and tenor of its Deep South setting better than almost any other fact-based movie of its era," wrote film critic, Bruce Eder.