Phenix City, Alabama, a.k.a. “Sin City, U.S.A.,” 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, cowritten 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.”
—Juliet Clark