The Phenix City Story 🇺🇸 (Příběh z Phenix City )

Phenix City, a town in Alabama of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, was known as Sin City in the mid-1950s. A group of gangsters ran a very prosperous gambling, drug, and prostitution business there, and whenever ordinary citizens wanted to speak out against the situation, the gangsters responded with a wave of cold-blooded violence. This culminated in the murder of State Attorney General candidate Albert Patterson outside his office. Order was only brought about by army troops who imposed martial law in the city. Director Phil Karlson was inspired by these events to make a film that combines real, historically documented events with fictional ones, and real public persons with movie types. Karlson’s method is consistent with this: he intersperses almost documentary-like material with stylized scenes, resulting in a very vivid and exciting portrait of a city gripped by crime and corruption.

Milan Hain

The film is screened in cooperation with the U.S. Embassy in Prague.