Anatomy of a Murder fascinated me when I was a kid. Not that I ever saw this 1959 courtroom drama. But the title was intriguing, and I was captivated by the poster art. Against a lurid orange and red backdrop, it features the fragmented silhouette of a crudely drawn human body, with the film’s title sprawling across the figure’s legs and torso. This was the work of Saul Bass, the graphic designer whose long list of Hollywood credits includes the title sequences from some of Hitchcock’s finest: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho. On the Anatomy of a Murder poster, there were no glamour shots of film’s stars, who included veteran Jimmy Stewart and up-and-comers Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott. This was not, clearly, intended as a star-spangled production: the poster was all about the movie.
This movie was the work of Otto Preminger, an Austrian emigré who had first made his mark in Hollywood with classy noirs like Laura (1944). When the studio system was in its death throes, he moved on with great success to independent production. I’m grateful to film scholar Nick Pinkerton, whose notes to the DVD edition of Anatomy of a Murder include the following: “Preminger didn’t court controversy; he went steady with it. He frankly depicted heroin addiction in a 1955 screen adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. He helped to bust the blacklist by crediting Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter on 1960’s Exodus. He visited a gay bar in 1962’s Advise and Consent, tangled with Cardinal Spellman over 1963’s The Cardinal and in Anatomy of a Murder put the [Production Code Administration’s] stock-in-trade, the very idea of euphemistic or insinuating language, on trial.”
How exactly was language on trial in Anatomy of a Murder? We spend much of it in a courtroom, where the proceedings move forward so realistically that law students cite this movie as one of their favorites. Stewart, as the defense attorney in a murder case, performs his courtroom role so artfully (beneath an aw-shucks exterior) that we’re rooting for him, even though we’re not quite sure that the defendant (Gazzara as a hot-tempered soldier with an enticing wife) deserves to be let off. In the name of realism, words and concepts are bandied about—rape, woman chaser, panties—that in earlier days would have run afoul of stringent MPAA rules about what can be said or implied on screen.
Part of the reason the film seems so real is that its basic story really did happen, in the same Upper Peninsula town where Preminger staged his production. It was made into a bestselling novel by a certain Robert Traver, this being the pen name of a Michigan Supreme Court justice who went back into private practice after losing an election, much like Stewart’s character. Partly to keep to the reality of the situation, Preminger was inspired to bring in an actual attorney—and a famous one—to preside over the film’s courtroom. He was Robert Welch, a superstar in that era for taking down Senator Joseph McCarthy in the nationally televised Army hearings of 1954.
Preminger too had studied law, as had his father before him. Maybe that’s why he ends his film with ambiguity, not with a clear sense of of who’s right and who’a wrong. Says a character in another Preminger film, “The truth is what the jury decides.” This is a fascinating movie about complicated people whose depths we’ll never entirely plumb . . . and the unexpectedly jazzy Duke Ellington score has its own enigmatic allure.
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