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A jeremiad on Vice Town, U.S.A., with Scripture in one hand and tabloid in the other. "My friends, I bring you news from Hell." Phenix City, Alabama, a malign crust from a century's worth of gambling, hooch and whoring. The shadowy industry has an affable face, the glad-handing local boss (Edward Andrews) who runs the saloon with marked cards and toothpick-chewing brutes. The limping attorney (John McIntire) has learned the advantages of keeping quiet but the old reformist fire is rekindled by the son (Richard Kiley) back from war, out of one dictatorship and into another. "The law with a loaded gun in its hand," a Phil Karlson specialty. Newsreel grays for the vérité prelude and high-contrast noir for the dramatization, garish neon to cover up beatings in dark alleys, blood dripping on the ballot box. Startling brutality salts the reportage: A little Black girl skips along the road, the child-height camera swivels to a distorted view of a looming goon, the tiny corpse is hurled off a moving car onto the hero's lawn with a threatening note pinned to her dress. (The only thing more alarming than the act of violence is a racist cop's nonchalant response to it.) Point blank shootings test the crusader's distaste for vigilante justice, things are worked out via a feminine conscience deep in the swamp of masculine aggression. The raid is on "a dirty, filthy code that I inherited from my father that I don't wanna hand down to my children," sometimes it takes a militia to do so. Walking Tall is no opportunistic retread but Karlson's thorny reassessment of heartland sordidness two decades later, the tragic embrace of the bloodlust here decried. With Kathryn Crosby, Lenka Peterson, James Edwards, Biff McGuire, John Larch, Jean Carson, and Helen Martin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |