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.

 

 

The Several Faces of Laura

 Laura? She’s the face in a misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats on a summer night. These words come from Johnny Mercer’s memorable lyrics to “Laura,” a jazz standard that was written by David Raksin to underscore Otto Preminger’s 1944 romantic thriller of that name. It was because of that evocative music that I ended up watching Laura once again.  

 When the “Laura” theme turned up on my classical music station, I immediately recalled the Preminger film. In my mind’s eye, I could easily picture the cast: Gene Tierney as the beautiful but potentially tragic Laura; Dana Andrew as the clean-cut cop who falls in love with her portrait; Judith Anderson as her cold-blooded aunt; Vincent Price as the parasitic Shelby Carpenter. Most of all, I recollected Clifton Webb’s matchless portrayal of newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, whose involvement in Laura’s sad fate is more complex than it first appears. Lydecker, of course, is a smug little man known for his sharp wit and vicious tongue. As he quips, discussing his writing methods, “I don’t use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” He’s the character who has most of the film’s best lines: no wonder Webb was the sole acting nominee from Laura in a year that also featured Gaslight and Double Indemnity, along with unlikely winner Going My Way.

 One thing I learned from my local classical music station: Preminger was determined to build his film around a very different musical theme, Duke Ellington’s 1933 “Sophisticated Lady.” It’s a great tune, of course, but one that by 1944 was very well known. When Preminger, a man whose word was law on a movie set, announced to composer David Raksin his plans to use the Ellington piece, Raksin had an immediately objection. The tune, he argued, was just too familiar to evoke the mystery of Laura. Preminger gave Raksin a weekend to come up with something better. Happily for all of us, he did.

 The music, though, is not the only thing to admire about Laura . There’s its striking Oscar-winning black & white cinematography, its elegant costumes, its well-matched cast. It’s only in the afterglow of The End that the viewer stops to ponder character motivations that just don’t make much sense. The film was based on a best-selling novel by the once-hugely-popular Vera Caspary. Perhaps in novel form the murky doings of central characters might have seemed more convincing. In any case, Laura was a huge hit for Twentieth Century-Fox. When I wrote about it previously for Beverly in Movieland (March 26, 2013), I had just come from a big-screen showing of the film as part of the L.A. Cinematheque’s annual Noir City series. My friend and film noir expert Alan K. Rode was on hand to explain how Preminger became the director as well as the producer of Laura, despite a serious falling out with Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck over a previous project.

 I won’t repeat Alan’s full explanation here, except to say that Zanuck’s first choice for director was the well-established Rouben Mamoulian, who had made cinema history via his experiments with sound in 1929’s Applause, while also directing such landmark Broadway shows as Oklahoma! and Porgy and Bess. But because of questionable casting choices and an insistence that Laura’s essential portrait be painted by his own artist-wife, Mamoulian got the boot. I saw her work hanging on the walls when I interviewed an aged Mamoulian in his home, and I’m convinced that his firing was all to the good.