Word: phenix
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...banner headlines ran the byline of the stranger at the bar: Edwin Strickland, 39, the balding bachelor reporter of the Birmingham News, who has made a career of sniffing out crime and corruption, in 1954 played a major role in exposing the blend of sex, graft and murder in Phenix City, Ala. (TIME, June...
...Phenix City Story (Allied Artists). Long before the Civil War, Phenix City, Ala.-its name was Lively in those days-was known as the Sodom of the South. By 1941 it had grown into a "Sin City" of more than 15,000 permanent residents, almost all of them employed in the vice factories-gambling dens, brothels, dope parlors-that lined Phenix City's 14th and Dillingham Streets. By night the population doubled, and most of the steady customers came from Fort Benning, the U.S. Army's training camp across the Chattahoochee. When the boys didn't come...
Soon after World War II began, the backroom boys of Phenix City were counting their tainted blessings at the rate of $100 million a year; they had a good thing, and they meant to keep it. When church groups organized against them, the bosses simply bought themselves a quorum of elders. When good citizens tried to fight them at the polls, the bosses bought votes at $10 a head and put in a puppet government. Members of cleanup committees were subjected to a campaign of nuisance arrests and tire slashings. Two were badly beaten up, on a downtown street...
That tore it. Alabama's Governor Gordon Persons was forced by public opinion to declare martial law. The National Guard took over. Phenix City was as dead as any 100-year-old harlot ought to be. During the next six months, a grand jury voted 741 indictments, including three for the murder of Lawyer Patterson. The accused: Chief Deputy Sheriff Albert Fuller, convicted as the triggerman, was sentenced to life in prison; County Solicitor Arch Ferrell was acquitted of complicity; Alabama's Attorney General Silas Garrett, still in office at the time of the murder...
This is the sensational true story that The Phenix City Story tries to tell. The trouble is that in trying to handle their dramatic subject with a "documentary" technique the producers have come up with an overexcited document, and a drama that too often trickles away into the fine print. And yet Phenix City has the force of see-and-touch realism. The action was filmed among the same sallow bars, heat-shimmering sidewalks and deceptively innocent-looking back lots that watched it in the life. The actors try hard to weather naturally into the scene. Edward Andrews succeeds wonderfully...