Courtroom movies are rarely about the case at hand. Witness for the Prosecution centers on a murder trial, but at its heart it’s a whodunit. The Caine Mutiny is a morality tale about duty, not a 1L class on naval law. The upcoming Inherit the Wind (1960) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) are both ostensibly about the narrow cases before the courts, but both dissolve into lawyers speechifying about social issues. And this all makes sense, since if your movie is just a bunch of people practicing law, your viewers are going to want to bill the hours they spend watching it.
Anatomy of a Murder, on the other hand, hews to a realistic portrayal of a case like it’s trying to win Mock Trial. Army Lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) murdered the man who may have raped his wife Laura (Lee Remick). Former District Attorney Paul Biegler (James Stewart) is Manion’s representation and decides upon a defense of insanity. They go to trial and the jury finds Manion not guilty by reason of insanity, the end. Honestly, there’s not a lot of drama there.
But the movie is made with care and finds a way to get the viewer invested in the minutia of the case. Will Biegler be able to get the rape onto the record? Was Manion coached into the insanity defense? Will a key witness testify? And the performances, especially from Stewart and George C. Scott (as big-city prosecutor Claude Dancer), successfully keep the movie from feeling like a dull procedural.
Rating: 7/10. At the low end, New York City lawyers charge $150 / hour, so I’m gonna say this movie owes me $412.50.
Cast and Crew
There’s something about the Golden Age of Hollywood stars, isn’t there? You watch Jimmy Stewart on screen and you realize that, wow, we might never get another one of him. Starting this column in 1950 means we’ve only caught Stewart in Harvey, and this will be his only other appearance. So what were his later-career roles?
His work with Alfred Hitchcock. Their four hookups were Rope (1948)1, Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958).
A bunch of films with director Anthony Mann, most of them of the Western or adventure persuasion. An outlier was The Glenn Miller Story (1954), about deceased trombonist Glenn Miller.2
His two collabs with John Ford. One produced banger The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), where Stewart played “Ranse” Stoddard, the man who shoots Liberty Valance.3 Ranse is a riff on Stewart’s sheriff character from Destry Rides Again (1939), who won’t use violence to maintain order—until, y’know, he has to use violence to maintain order.
His other movies with hotshot directors: The Shop Around the Corner (1940)4 paired him with director Ernst Lubitsch; The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) hooked him up with Billy Wilder; and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) was a Best Picture winner with Cecil B. DeMille.
His final film role was in the sequel to An American Tail called Fievel Goes West. That might mean something to you, but I’m sorta baffled by that era of non-Disney animated movies.5
Speaking of hotshot directors Jimmy Stewart worked with: Otto Preminger directed Anatomy of a Murder.6 Preminger’s work was known for pushing and prodding at the edges of Hollywood. For instance, while Stanley Kramer was doing stodgy “message films” like The Defiant Ones to decry racism, Preminger made Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959)—two films with all-Black casts. He consistently challenged the Hays code (with movies like The Moon Is Blue), hired folks on the blacklist, and expressed prescient concern about the fallibility of big institutions (like in 1962’s Advise & Consent).7
Okay, one more actor: Eve Arden plays Biegler’s sassy secretary. She had the lead role on “Our Miss Brooks” (1952-1956), which was, I guess, the “Abbott Elementary” of the 1950s. Arden was also in Mildred Pierce (1945, though Joan Crawford’s the lead) and Grease (1978, where she played the principal).
The Trivia
Anatomy of a Murder is noteworthy for its soundtrack, which was scored by jazz legend Duke Ellington. He won a bunch of Grammys for the soundtrack and also cameoed as Pie-Eye in the film, so let’s chat a bit about Duke8 and jazz. (Note that all the songs mentioned below can be found in this Spotify playlist.)
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was a percussive, economical pianist9 who gained fame in the 1920s playing at the Cotton Club in Harlem. There, he developed a jungle style of jazz, which was defined by growling, wah-wah brass. A good example of this is “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”—though if you listen to it, you might notice that there’s no piano at all!10 That’s because Ellington’s real genius was in composition, arrangement, and bandleading. His give-and-take with the band—where their sounds shaped his compositions and his compositions then provided direction back to the players—resulted in hit songs like “Black and Tan Fantasy”11 and “Mood Indigo.”
In the 1930s, Ellington moved from smaller ensembles to big bands. This gave us some of his biggest hits, including “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Sophisticated Lady,”12 and “Caravan.”13
By the end of the decade, Duke hooked up with Billy Strayhorn, and Strayhorn would spend his career composing alongside Ellington. Strayhorn famously wrote Ellington’s signature track, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” along with other hits like “Satin Doll.” Sometimes Ellington is accused of not sharing enough of the credit with Strayhorn and the sidemen in his orchestra.
We’re eliding over a lot here (the book on jazz I have says “Ellington’s contribution is too vast to summarize here,” and when a book says that, it augurs poorly for our tiny little Trivia section), so we’ll cut to the end: Ellington died in 1974 and his son Mercer took over for his orchestra. Ellington’s legacy lives on, not least in one of the coolest tributes to him: the Stevie Wonder song “Sir Duke.”
Odds and Ends
Both Arthur O’Connell (who played Biegler’s drunken buddy) and George C. Scott scored Best Supporting Actor nominations for this film…Biegler mentions that “none but the lonely hearts shall know my anguish,” which is a reference to this Tchaicovsky piece…the judge mentions he can digest pig iron; pig iron is made by smelting iron ore in a blast furnace and is an intermediate product in the creation of steel…a character mentions that he “never saw a gin drinker you could trust,” which is worth remembering, while another states that “it is impossible to tell if a mature married woman has been raped,” which is worth forgetting…speaking of gin, Lee Remick’ll be back in this column in a boozy 1962 movie, so we’ll discuss her then.
One last neat fact about this movie: real-life lawyer Joseph N. Welch played the judge presiding over the trial. Welch is the guy who yelled at Joseph McCarthy and his aide Roy Cohn: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Joseph McCarthy was a bully, and sometimes ya gotta stand up to bullies.
We’ve described those other three films but haven’t yet touched on Rope. It’s based on the Leopold and Loeb murders where two guys commit “the perfect murder” to show how Übermensch they are. Spoiler: they get caught because they’re actually Betamensch.
Glenn Miller was famous for “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “String of Pearls,” and “In the Mood.” Don’t mix The Glenn Miller Story up with the Kirk Douglas flick Young Man with a Horn (1950), which was inspired by the life of Bix Beiderbecke.
Okay okay, so John Wayne’s character is actually the one who shoots Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) but, as the movie teaches us, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The Shop Around the Corner was remade (kinda sorta) into You’ve Got Mail (1998)
The Secret of NIMH? The Land Before Time? Rock-a-Doodle? Anastasia? Just a total blind spot for me.
We’ve seen Preminger as a Nazi colonel in Stalag 17 and behind the camera in the disappointing The Man with the Golden Arm.
Preminger was also a domineering bully. He tortured Jean Seberg during the filming of Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958)—hear about it in Karina Longworth’s series on Seberg and Jane Fonda.
Not “the Duke.” Just “Duke.”
Ellington’s playing is often tagged with adjectives like “restrained” or “economical” or “minimalist,” especially when compared to flashier stride pianists like James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Still, Ellington’s name is usually above theirs when talking about the “best” (whatever that means) jazz pianists.
Or maybe we’ll just call it really economical piano.
“Black and Tan Fantasy” was named for the meeting of races in the Cotton Club. Ellington used a similar title for his 1943 Carnegie Hall suite “Black, Brown, and Beige”; that work followed the African American musical experience, from work songs and spirituals to Latin dances in Harlem.
A Broadway revue about the music of Ellington, “Sophisticated Ladies,” came out in 1981.
That Spotify playlist includes the big band version of “Caravan,” but I also included one he did from later in his career with drummer Max Roach and bassist Charles Mingus, because Duke’s work in that trio is the only time I think he actually sounds cool.