Jimmy Stewart and George C. Scott faced off in one of film’s greatest courtroom dramas
Film Lists Jimmy Stewart
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. Because the new Conjuring movie didn’t scratch our itch for (supernatural) legal fireworks, we’re coping with five days of courtroom dramas.
Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)
Most courtroom dramas are exercises in narrative compression. In the real world, the American justice system grinds slowly. But on TV and at the movies, an arrest is followed quickly by a trial, which usually takes just a few days—or even a few scenes. Anatomy Of A Murder is an exception. Director-producer Otto Preminger’s low-key classic follows a murder trial from start to finish, from the arraignment to the jury selection to the verdict. The film goes deep into procedure, detailing how the nitpicking objections of prosecutors and defense attorneys are part of a larger strategy to bend the law in their favor. It’s a long, leisurely paced, and utterly absorbing picture, the kind that’s hard to turn off whenever it pops up on cable.
Much of the credit for why Anatomy Of A Murder is so mesmerizing belongs to the cast, led by Jimmy Stewart. In 1959, Stewart was at the end of a decade where his work with masters like Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann had added darker shades to his otherwise bright and affable screen presence. There’s a slyness to Stewart’s performance in Anatomy Of A Murder: He plays the “humble country lawyer” Paul Biegler, defending a soldier who killed a bartender accused of raping his wife near an Upper Peninsula Michigan resort. Biegler is charming and folksy, entertaining the courtroom with witty zingers. But he also subtly—and perhaps unethically—coaches his client on how to describe his crime in legally defensible terms. And it’s implied that he’s partly motivated by hurt feelings over losing his job as district attorney.
Ben Gazzara plays the client, gruff and sarcastic hothead Lt. Frederick Manion, while Lee Remick is his sexpot wife, Laura. Unlike the Hollywood-trained Stewart, Gazzara and Remick emerged from the worlds of Broadway and anthology television, where newer styles of naturalistic acting were spreading in the ’50s. Biegler’s antagonist Claude Dancer—a big city ringer from the state attorney general’s office, brought in to kibbutz on the case before ultimately taking it over—is played by George C. Scott; Scott also apprenticed in New York theater, but on the grander, more Shakespearean side.
Preminger and screenwriter Wendell Mayes, adapting a semi-autobiographical novel by the lawyer and judge John D. Voelker, mostly just let these actors and their different styles play off each other in long scenes of testimony and cross-examination. A brassy Duke Ellington score adds a note of sophistication, as does the surprisingly frank dialogue, which tosses around words like “sexual climax” and “panties.” (In one of the movie’s most famous scenes, the judge, dryly played by real-life McCarthy hearings hero Joseph N. Welch, preemptively reprimands the gallery for tittering at all the panty talk.)
But what mostly stands out about Anatomy Of A Murder is how low-stakes and tawdry the murder case is. The truth of what happened between Laura, the barkeep, and the lieutenant is never definitively established. The implication is that Laura stepped out on her louse of a husband one night and flirted with a popular local bartender—who in a drunken stupor sexually assaulted her, provoking the soldier into beating her and shooting him. It’s hard to say what “justice” would look like in this case. The filmmakers even comment on how little it all matters by spending two and half hours on a story that’s then wrapped up in a rush, with an anticlimactic ending and a stinger shot of a trashcan.
What’s ultimately important here is the gamesmanship, and the many different and fascinating ways the players execute their moves. Anatomy Of A Murder is really the anatomy of a courtroom, examining how even the simplest, most inconsequential case can be an occasion for some great theater.
Availability: Anatomy Of A Murder can be rented or purchased from Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube.
48 Comments
I always considered the pinnacle of George C. Scott’s career to be his starring role in Man getting hit by Football
The football! His groin! It works on so many levels!
it’s implied that he’s partly motivated by hurt feelings over losing his job as district attorney.
I’ve seen this movie a couple times over the years, and this is the first time I’ve can remember him formerly being the District Attorney, or being actively resentful over no longer being in that position.It’s a really good legal thriller, and anybody who likes LAW & ORDER: WHICHEVER should definitely give it a watch.
I’m a bit perplexed by the other half of that sentence. Why would it be unethical for a defense lawyer to encourage the defendant to make his actions seem more sympathetic to a jury? The defense lawyer’s entire job is to put the defendant’s case as persuasively as possible, within the limits of perjury (and a few other procedural rules). It would be unethical for the lawyer NOT to coach the defendant on how best to describe his actions so as to gain the sympathy of the judge and jury!
I think they were implying that the coaching here may have gone beyond the limits of perjury (though it’s difficult to say, since we don’t get to witness the events ourselves).
Well then don’t say “coaches his client on how to describe his crime in legally defensible terms”, say “tells his client to lie”. Because the two are very different, and “coaches his client on how to describe his crime in legally defensible terms” is exactly what he should be doing.I would normally try not to be pedantic about this, except that this is kind of a big issue at the moment: there is very little understanding of, or acceptance of, the idea of the right to legal defence, and a lot of people do literally believe that defence lawyers are acting unethically when they try to defend their client. So it’s troubling to see the reviewer seemingly embracing that perspective!
What Stewart’s character is doing is what a good defense attorney is supposed to do, but definitely for the time it was bracing to actually show people how the system really works. It’s a good companion piece to 12 Angry Men in that way- reminding people that the system can in fact be doing the right thing even if someone who may be guilty gets acquitted.
Favorite line “How does a jury strike that from their memory? (answer) “They can’t!”
Ya got me — though I will say that, at the time, what most people knew about lawyers was what they saw on PERRY MASON.
I don’t remember the details of the movie as well as I remember the book. He’d been a prosecutor before going into his defense practice and, in such a small town, that probably meant he was indeed the DA. After the trial, the judge congratulates him on his successful “prosecution” – of Barney Quill and the rape charge.
Thank you, KathyMacVan!I never read the book, only seen the movie….
Otto Preminger is the master. THE MASTER.
No, no, no! He was Mr Freeze, totally different villain.
even when he failed he did it in a spectacular fashion
Easter egg time: thanks to HDTV, you can see the cover of a book that a character is reading when Stewart enters. It’s Exodus by Leon Uris—Exodus was the very next movie that Preminger directed.
Also, Eve Arden is great as Stewart’s (of course) wise-cracking secretary. And Saul Bass’ credit sequence fits Ellington’s music perfectly.
I remember being stunned by how frank the dialogue was, given all the film and TV I’d seen from this era was so thoroughly Hays Coded. May or may not have provoked a legitimate spit-take, particularly with much of it coming from Jimmy “Aw shucks” Stewart.
Almost all of Preminger’s films give the finger to the Hays code
In 1952 there had actually been a Supreme Court ruling that film was as much protected speech as anything else (overturning a much earlier verdict.) There was still obscenity law to contend with, which was much stricter than today, and also studios didn’t want to make trouble in general. Religious groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency had a lot of sway in this period. But the studios poked around the edges, and you also had independent films going even further, as well as importing foreign films that didn’t follow the same standards. You can sorta see how things started to accelerate leading to the patchwork of the late 60s which led to the ratings system being embraced. Like another good example from this time is Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, it’s remarkable that something so blatantly anti-war came out of a studio in 1957.
Yeah, the Hays Code was the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” of its day . . . an attempt to do something voluntarily to stave off legally binding legislation.
One neat addendum to this movie: George C. Scott was so crushed when he didn’t get an Oscar that he was driven to some deep soul-searching about why it mattered so much to him. He ultimately decided that it shouldn’t matter and he wanted nothing to do with the awards ever again, causing him to become the first person to refuse to accept an Oscar when he won for Patton.
I once read an article about law professors who were asked which movies a first year student should watch to see what being a lawyer was really like.This movie was rated #1.
The problem with that is that while the movie is good at some things, the trial procedure is out of date and may have been out of date at the time the movie was made. When I saw it again about 15 years ago, I notice a lot of old “trial by ambush” stuff, with last minute evidence and unknown witnesses showing up. In modern criminal procedure rules, discovery and disclosure of defenses and disclosure of alibi rules would prevent the kind of surprise stuff that happened in “Anatomy of a Murder”. Today, about the only time anyone can take the stand without a party knowing what he or she will say is when the defendant testifies, and then comes up with something as outlandish and unbelievable as the story by that guy in Iowa, who was just convicted.
Interested in the story of the guy in Iowa.. got a link?
It was the trial for the murder of Mollie Tibbetts, the defendant being Christhian Bahena Rivera. An internet search of those names should get you to numerous article covering it. Wikipedia also has a page for “Murder of Mollie Tibbetts”.
Cheers!
I honestly don’t think Stewart has ever been better, and he was pretty damn good in a lot of things. The movie is so good it will make you reinterpret your understanding of the 50s.
I think it’s likely that most of what most people think of the 1950s is untrue.
what most of us think about X in the past…is very much assured….to be inaccurate. we won, the winners tell the tale…and we as a group, have chosen to lie to ourselves. yay…
Ben Gazzara gave one of the most calculated and brilliant performances in this film. His face and eyes could do more in conveying what the brilliant script was only hinting at. He is so damn dangerous it like vapor pouring from the screen.
That scene shows the ethical question involved: How far does the attorney go in preparing a defense based on some type of mental “disease, disorder or defect” which makes it impossible for the defendant to know the criminality of his or her actions. And both Gazzara and Stewart play it very well. As you say, Gazzara is listening to Stewart, trying to grasp what he is getting at with his answers. The key is when Gazzara says “I must have been mad” and Stewart immediately tells him that “bad temper” won’t excuse it. Gazzara shows that he has picked up on the difference between “mad’ as anger and “mad” as a psychological condition. Without the lawyer bluntly saying “we’ll tell them you’re crazy”, the defendant gets the idea of what he must do. As you point out, Gazzara and Stewart convey this very well.
That scene shows too how important was to have Jimmy Stewart in the role in order to sympathize with the defence. The same scene, the same dialogue, played by Kirk Douglas, and we probably would turn against him.
I had not thought of that, but it is true. Stewart is not so much telling Gazzara what to do but leading him to find the conclusion. As you say, just because of his screen persona, Kirk Douglas might have come across as bullying or brow-beating. This made me start to wonder about who among modern actors would be like Stewart (and who would be like Douglas) in a modern adaptation of this story? And who would play Gazzara’s part?
Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Daniel Kaluuya
Where’s Bunny?
Wrong turn at Albu-cooykee?
Missing in the lake, still.
Lee Remick probably had better roles than this & maybe was even more smoking hot in them. But I’m not sure
I’ve never seen this – will definitely have to check it out. No the hugest Jimmy Stewart fan, but when he was great he was great.Love courtroom dramas, favorite of all time is Judgment at Nuremberg. Always thought if there’s such a thing as required viewing, that should be it. Would love to see a review of that.
This is an interesting example of how censorship standards were changing in the movies. People tend to draw a line between the Production Code and the MPAA ratings system but the court precedent for movies being protected free speech was established as early as 1952. While studios didn’t rush to make trouble, by ‘59 you’ve got a movie like this. There’s even some ambiguity as to whether “justice” is being done here, but you feel like it’s Stewart’s duty to provide the best possible defense so that’s what he does. And if the guy’s getting away with something, well, it’s hard to feel too bad for the victim. This is daring stuff for the time.
I just finished reading a lengthy article about Jimmy’s service in WW2 as a bomber captain. By all accounts it shook him pretty bad. Looking at the photos from the beginning of the war to the time he was grounded just a year or 2 later, it looks like he aged 15 years.
I got a Grey’s Anatomy alert for this?
you sure did. and admit it…it was worth it, for this…
Is that show still on the air?!
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The problem with George C. Scott is that there isn’t enough George C. Scott. His blown cross-examination scene in this is magnificent- there isn’t a trial lawyer alive that hasn’t made the mistake Dancer makes here, and Scott’s attempt at preserving his dignity is perfection. Pay attention to what’s in the background in nearly every scene- Preminger doesn’t waste a frame.
Claude Dancer—a big city ringer from the state attorney general’s office, brought in to kibbutzHe was brought into a socialist farm in Israel?
“Kibitz”, not “kibbutz”. Good article, btw.