The New Pictures

The 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 to Sin City, the city went to the boys--in "mattress vans" that parked along the roads near camp.

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 and in broad daylight, by hired bullies. In June 1954 Lawyer Albert Patterson, who had won nomination as Attorney General of Alabama on a cleanup ticket, was shot to death while sitting in his automobile just outside his office in the center of town.

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, has not yet been brought to trial.

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: he hits the apogee of Southern villainy as he slomires agreeably about town, sweet-talking old ladies, flipping quarters like a slow jackpot, and looking all the while like a fat, greasy thumb that has been stuck too long in the pork barrel.

Female on the Beach (Universal). "Come away with me to Los Angeles!" the wealthy widow (Judith Evelyn) implores. Her hands wander idly over the alluring mass of rented muscle that lies sprawled upon her divan. Alas, no cash, no mash. To make ends meet, Jeff Chandler has hired out as a sex shill to a couple of confidence gamesters at a California seashore resort, and when the lady starts pinching pennies. Jeff stops pinching her. He just picks up his muscles and walks out. That same night the lady dies. "I'm sorry," says Jeff, and waits a full 24 hours --whether out of respect or satiety, the script does not make clear--before he picks up another well-shaped pebble on the beach.

.. Joan Crawford, the widow of a gambler, has a soul as rubbery as Chandler's pectorals, though not so much in evidence. "Ben was older than I was," she explains, "and rich ... I didn't know very much when I met him, but what I knew I knew well." Jeff has a confession to make too. "I don't hate women," he mutters. "I just hate the way they are." "I wish I could afford you," murmurs Joan. "Save your pennies," he encourages.

She bites his wrist. He rips her dress off. Her eyes dilate. She clutches her breasts protectively. He kisses her brutally. She goes limp. Then slowly her arms, as if moved by a will of their own, go gliding around him, and her fingers dig greedily into his flesh. "Just once." she sighs a little later. "Just once."

Poor Joan--not even the censor can save her. But he can make it legal. Jeff, it suddenly turns out. was only paying a debt of honor when he drove the other widow to her death--and besides, the lady didn't commit suicide after all. She was mur dered by one of Jeff's jealous girl friends. "The past," sighs Joan, as she clings to him, "is buried under a lot of dead years."

All of which probably proves that, as far as the Hollywood censor is concerned, you have to make your lie before you can bed on it.

Footsteps in the Fog (Columbia) whips up the classic recipe for a melodramatic potboiler: mix two engaging scoundrels (Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons) with a brace of murders, add a pinch of blackmail, a generous helping of blue London fog, some bilious green Edwardian interiors, the clop-clop of hansom cabs, and allow to simmer for 90 minutes over a gaslight flame.

When the film opens, Granger stands bareheaded in the rain at a cemetery as his wife--very rich and too old for him--is laid to rest. His friends are touched by his noble composure in the face of tragedy. Then he goes home alone, glances at the huge portrait of his late wife, and his satisfied smile confirms the growing suspicion that foul murder has been done. The camera switches to the mansion's cellar, where Housemaid Jean Simmons, her wits sharpened by adversity, has just finished dosing some rats with a little of the medicine that was given to her ailing mistress. The rats are dead.

And now the long duel begins. Simmons artfully divulges her knowledge, and is quickly promoted from maid to housekeeper and allowed to keep the wife's jewels. One evening she goes out in the fog to mail a letter. Following after, Granger steals up and brains her with his walking stick. At least, he thought it was Jean. It is quite a shock when Jean walks in the door and he realizes he has killed the wrong woman. And so it goes, through plot and ingenious counterplot, until justice--which has been happily nodding through most of the picture--rouses sufficiently to give the culprits their just deserts. It seems a pity, since Granger and Simmons have managed to make their evildoers a couple of the year's most attractive film people.

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