Anatomy of a Murder: Piecing Together a Heinous Crime

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.

 

 

Ben Gazzara, Al Capone, and Me

Ben Gazzara and I shared some scenes in 1975. Not that he would have remembered. Gazzara, who just died at 81, was an actor’s actor. An Actors Studio alumnus, he played Brick in the Broadway premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and was featured in A Hatful of Rain. At the movies, he was a soldier on trial for avenging his wife's rape in 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder, Later, he made several films for his compadre, John Cassavetes, starred in TV’s Run for Your Life, and scored as a slimy pornographer in The Big Lebowski.

Gazzara was once known as a picky actor, turning down plum parts in major films. I guess he wasn’t feeling quite so choosy when offered the lead role of Al Capone in a biopic for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Capone was a co-production, so its budget was a trifle higher than usual. Roger wanted a down-and-dirty crime pic like his own 1967 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The screenwriter for both was Howard Browne, a veteran of TV classics, like Cheyenne, Maverick, and 77 Sunset Strip. But Howard was also a former journalist nostalgic about his days covering the Chicago crime beat. I remember him in story meetings, rhapsodizing about the Windy City -- “I loved her like a woman.”

Browne’s Capone was the usual brash, crass crime boss. To me his most interesting character was Frank Nitti, portrayed as a numbers-cruncher whose larcenous deeds were at odds with his buttoned-down style. In Browne’s script, Nitti was unique among the thugs in that he dressed like an accountant and never swore. Some of that characterization went out the window, though, when the part went to Sylvester Stallone, on the strength of his work in Corman’s Death Race 2000. As Nitti, Stallone was clearly feeling his oats, adding in all the cusswords that Browne had deliberately left out. Oh well.

Roger entrusted directing duties to Steve Carver, who’d scored a solid Corman-style hit with another period film, Big Bad Mama. Steve invited me to appear in a speakeasy scene, so I showed up at an old ballroom near downtown L.A., and received flapper garb: a fairly ugly green dress and brown headband, plus garish makeup. There were scores of extras, but Steve positioned me at a roulette table, right near the door where a lawman or rival gang member (was it Dick Miller?) was about to burst in and wreak havoc. My second big moment came when Gazzara as Capone flies into a murderous rage, and someone ends up crash-landing on a craps table. I was one of the merry-makers standing around the table, reacting to the mayhem. Through multiple takes, I discovered I was reflected in a big wall-mirror that was part of the set. If I moved out of position even slightly, the shot would be ruined. Rarely have I felt so important!

Capone performed only modestly at the box office. But years later, Gazzara got another juicy Corman opportunity, playing a Singapore brothel-keeper in Saint Jack. This was a 1979 comeback film for Peter Bogdanovich, whom Roger had staked to a production deal. As Joe Dante remarked to me, “The thing about Roger is that you meet him on your way up, and if you’re not lucky you meet him again on your way down. Peter was particularly lucky because when he was on his downward spiral Roger hired him to do this picture. . . . It turned out to be a pretty good picture, and it put him back on the road.”