The Phenix City Story

The Phenix City Story (1955, dir. Phil Karlson) narrates in faux documentary fashion the events leading up to the murder of Albert Patterson (John McIntire), an elderly lawyer running for the position of attorney general in Alabama, with the avowed promise of wiping out corruption in the town. A crime syndicate runs the town by threat of violence and intimidation.  Patterson at first declares his neutrality and is willing to let things be in Phenix City.  He sees corruption as a regrettable presence that has always existed in the town.  He even has an uneasy relationship with the crime boss.  But when gangsters beat up his son and others opposed to the syndicate, and when the body of a young black girl is dumped in his front yard, he changes his mind and takes a stand.

The soldiers who patronize the bars, prostitutes, and gambling in Phenix City are stationed at Fort Benning, which lies directly across the Chattahoochee River in Columbus, Georgia.  The film was mostly shot on location, and some town citizens served as extras and minor characters.  This provides a sense of realism strengthened by the thirteen-minute news clip about Phenix City that introduces the film.  It is also relatively direct in its portrayal of violence, the murder of Ed Patterson, the killing of a black child, the bombing of a house with mother and children inside, and various other fights and beatings.  It portrays a brutal, violent, dangerous world.  Although the final scene tells us that crime has been driven out of Phenix City, the newsreel introduction, which gives practically all the events of the story away, implies that corruption is on the rise again.  Moreover, the film also implies that when voters have the chance to cast ballots to elect honest leaders, they fail to show up at the polls, either out of complacency or fear of violence or both.  After Patterson’s assassination, citizens form a lynch mob to kill those responsible, enraged that law enforcement has failed to maintain order.  John Patterson calms the mob with the argument that they should rely on the law to deliver justice, although he promises to kill the culprits himself if the law fails.

Although black people hover mostly in the background, they are vulnerable to syndicate crime as well.  Zeke, a black man who works at one of the bars, warns Patterson of threats to his safety and helps Patterson’s son John (Richard Kiley) and his friend Fred Gage escape a bar fight.  Zeke’s young daughter is killed both as punishment for him and as a warning to John Patterson, whose two children and wife live in Albert Patterson’s house.  When John Patterson is about to kill his father’s murderer, Zeke talks him out of violent revenge, reminding him of the commandment “Thou shall not kill.” Patterson later replaces his dead father as attorney father. As flawed as it may be, the film therefore suggests that governance by legal institutions, flawed though they may be, is preferable to disorder and anarchy.

The Phenix City Story is straightforward and unrelenting.  Tension does rise as it approaches the moment of Patterson’s murder, but for the most it moves forward in a steady reportorial fashion. It ends shortly after Patterson’s death. This dark portrayal of the world does not call for a return to the early halcyon days of the pre-Civil War South.  It is a more general, more generic vision of post-World War II modern America. The director Phil Karlson reportedly tended to rewrite the screenplays written for his films. His vision of human nature and the world as expressed in his films was a grim one.  Crime and murder in Phenix City gave him a platform for dramatizing his view of the way things are in modern America.

The Cabin in the Cotton

The Cabin in the Cotton (1932; dir. Michael Curtiz) dramatizes a struggle between sharecroppers in the American South and the owners whose land they work.  The owners charge excessive fees to the croppers, who can’t get ahead or live beyond a subsistence level as a result.  In turn, the croppers steal cotton from the owners and sell it on the black market.  The film proclaims itself objective in the portrayal of this struggle (a message that scrolls down the screen in the beginning tells us so”: “it is not the object of the producers . . . to take sides. We are only concerned with an effort to picturize these conditions [of sharecropping]”), but in fact it favors the croppers.

The main character is Marvin Blake, played in a slope shouldered, hangdog manner by Richard Barthelmess.  He is the son of a cropper but is intent on getting ahead in life by attending school.  When his father dies, he faces having to drop out of school until the local landowner, Lane Norwood (Berton Churchill), offers him a job so he can continue his studies.  In a few years, Marvin keeps Norwood’s books, is a trusted employee, and appears to have won the heart of Norwood’s daughter Madge, played by Bette Davis in an early role. The croppers still see Marvin as one of their own and expect him to provide inside information and to help them continue stealing cotton.  Norwood expects Marvin to help him discover who is stealing cotton. Marvin is also torn between two lovers: Madge Norwood on the one hand and Betty Wright (Dorothy Jordan), a cropper’s daughter, on the other.  Poor Marvin is pulled back and forth throughout the film between Norwood and the croppers, between Madge and Lily.  In the end, a lawyer helps him organize a town meeting where he presents the complaints of each side to the other and ultimately declares himself on the side of the croppers.

Cotton is everywhere in the film, in the fields, the yards, and so on.  In the opening, cotton pickers are at work in the fields, white pickers in the foreground, black pickers in the background.  Strains of “Suwanee River” waft through the air, as do other songs associated with the South. 

The film focuses on white croppers.  Black sharecroppers rarely appear, and though they are victims of the system as well, they are barely acknowledged. The film suggests that Marvin’s meeting, which forces a contract on the owners which is fair to the croppers, has solved the problem, though we know the problem persisted almost to the present day.

Bette Davis as Norwood’s daughter Madge is all wealthy white Southern privilege, but she is more flapper than Southern belle, with her svelte dresses, cigarettes, flirtatiousness, and implied sexual looseness. Betty is ever-suffering in her unwavering and virtuous love for Marvin.

With a screenplay by Paul Green, The Cabin in the Cotton tries to evoke the folk life of Southerners early in the century.  There are several seemingly authentic moments where banjo players pick music.  In one scene, a blind black blues guitarist (Clarence Muse) plays his spiritual melodies that contrast with the upscale jazz of the band hired to play at the Norwood home. The implication here and elsewhere in the film is that modern ways have supplanted and blotted out the genuine folkways of the traditional South, which is being corrupted by greed and jazz (!). In general, the South of the film is entirely generic.  Southern accents are few and far between. 

Even in this early film, Bette Davis has her shtick down.  The film sizzles a bit when she’s on screen.  Churchill as Lane Norwood would be likeable were it not for his hostile indifference to the croppers, whom he cheats of justly earned income. The sharecropper farmers are mostly played for hillbilly effect: shiftless, dishonest, lazy.  They spy on the parties at the Norwood house.  They threaten Marvin when he doesn’t promise to give them his copy of Norwood’s books (which show how Norwood has cheated them). At the meeting, Marvin explains their tendency towards shiftlessness as the result of poverty.

It's difficult for the dramatic medium of film to convey the details and contexts of history.  As a result, partially, this film does not portray sharecropping as a product of history, of the ending of slavery in the American South and the collapse of the plantation system. Audiences in 1932 might have understood that the film shows an aspect of the post-Civil War economy and way of life in the South, but few would have recognized close causal links between sharecropping and the consequences of the Civil War.  The film is more aware of the economic disparities between the land owners and croppers, but it does not suggest that such fundamental economic inequalities ought to be remedied.  Rather, it argues that each side in its own place, the owners and the croppers, should treat the other in a fair manner. Beyond that, the film makes no overt or implied call for meaningful social change.

By its pious pledge of impartiality, Cabin in the Cotton hedges all bets. It asks its audience to appreciate the simple lives of the croppers and the luxurious surroundings of the owners.  Just as the croppers have their grievances against the owners, so do the planters have complaints against the croppers.  Only gradually does it make us aware that its loyalties fall with the croppers.  Never does it suggest that black sharecroppers faced equally difficult conditions.