“I told Paul Kohner that Lana was to play a second lieutenant’s wife and that the outfit Hope had selected was therefore correct,” Preminger recounted. “Besides, I and nobody else determines what the actors wear in my films.”5 When Kohner informed him that his client wouldn’t agree, Preminger said she could cancel the contract. “Kohner thought I was bluffing. But I never am.”6 Lana Turner had a different account of her collision with Otto. “I went for my fittings,” she insisted. “It was a very nice shop, but one of the costumes didn’t look good on me. Later, Otto called and immediately started to abuse me. He yelled, ‘I’ll show you this isn’t Universal-International or MGM. This is my independent picture. You’ll do and wear exactly what I say’ He kept on and on. I couldn’t stop him. Finally I hung up on him. I wouldn’t quit any film over something as trivial as a costume. But I’ve been in this business too long to take that kind of shouting from anybody”7 Otto’s rebuttal: “No one is indispensable.”
Otto quickly hired Lee Remick. “Lee was much more fun to work with than Lana,” Hope said. “We bought Lee’s costumes at the kind of places where her character, who would buy cheap, sleazy clothes, would actually shop. We bought off the rack and we went to Beck’s to buy clear plastic shoes.”8
For Lieutenant Frederick Manion, the officer charged with murder, Preminger chose Ben Gazzara, a stage actor he had admired playing a sadistic cadet in a Southern military academy in End as a Man. When he called him into his New York office, Preminger wanted George C. Scott, another stage actor whose work he had noted, to play a bartender, but having read the script before the interview Scott had decided he wanted the larger, showier role of the prosecuting attorney. “Wow, there was this dazzling joker who comes in, the attorney from Lansing, with the name of Dancer: how could you lose? It was a terrific part. I went to see Otto, who was very imposing, very intimidating, and when he asked me if I wanted to play the bartender part I said no. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I want to play this other part.’ He looked hard at me and after a few seconds said, ‘Oh, okay’ Just like that!”9
As the presiding judge—a role he was having trouble casting—Preminger’s director of publicity Nat Rudich suggested Joseph N. Welch, the Boston lawyer whose question to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings—“Have you, at last, sir, no sense of decency?”— had marked the beginning of the witch-hunting senator’s downfall and been etched into the conscience of the nation. Welch agreed to look at the script; and when he came down from Boston to meet with the director, admitting to having read only his own part, Preminger knew he had found his actor. On March 4, three weeks before the start of filming, Otto introduced Welch to the press at a luncheon at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. “I’m using a new 68-year-old face,” he announced, his blue eyes twinkling. In high impresario mode, Preminger also announced that he planned to complete the film in eight weeks and that he had already booked a preview screening in San Francisco on June 17.10 Confident he could maintain his schedule, he promised that the film would have its world premiere on July 1 at the Warner Beverly Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard, only a few blocks from Romanoff’s.
For the start of shooting in the Upper Peninsula, Preminger planned a flamboyant entrance: cast and crew arrived on a train of their own at 6:30 on a blustery March evening. Despite the thirty-five degrees below zero temperature, most of the population of Ishpeming and Marquette, the two towns where the film was to be made, showed up to welcome them. “We all arrived looking so glamorous and they were very poor in Ishpeming,” Rita Moriarty Otto’s executive assistant, remembered. “During the shooting of Bonjour Tristesse on the Riviera, I had grumbled about having to stay in London, and I told Otto that on the next one I wanted to be on the set. My ‘reward’ was Ishpeming! I’d never been to a small American town before.” Preminger booked everyone into a colonial-style hotel where the entire company shared meals in the dining room. And as he had hoped it would, a family feeling developed. Thrown together in an isolated small town, cast and crew established a communal spirit that would not have been possible in the studio. “We all used to go to the local dancing place, but not Otto; people would not have been relaxed if he had,” Rita Moriarty said. “Otto hung out with Welch and with Voelker, the author of the novel.”11 James Stewart recalled that Duke Ellington, the film’s composer, “played for us in the dining room at night, until ten, eleven, which was great fun for us. But then Otto heard about it and he said to Duke, ‘Now these kids have to get up in the morning to act and I don’t want them to stay up until midnight.’ So ‘the kids’ weren’t allowed in the dining room after dinner. It was a natural thing for Preminger to do: we were staying up too late.”12
Otto encouraged family members to stay for the entire shoot. To provide company for her husband, he hired Mrs. Welch to play a juror. Lee
On location in Ishpeming, Michigan, for the filming of Anatomy of a Murder. Left to right: Agnes (Mrs. Joseph) Welch, Otto, Lee Remick, and Joseph N. Welch.
Remick came with her husband and baby. Duke Ellington brought his common-law wife, Evie, along with jazz legend Billy Strayhorn. George C. Scott’s wife, Colleen Dewhurst, was with him the entire time. Eve Arden, cast as James Stewart’s secretary, was with her husband, Brooks West, appearing in the film as a straight-arrow prosecuting attorney. And, as often on his films—a sign of his interest in young people—Otto had an intern, “an enthusiastic fellow from Hong Kong; Otto got a kick out of him,” as Rita Moriarty recalled.13
Preminger asked Duke Ellington to remain on location for the entire shoot. “Usually a composer is hired when the film is over and he writes the score in a few weeks,” Preminger noted. “But I hire a composer before I begin shooting.”14 Preminger expected Ellington to compose on the spot, after he had absorbed the atmosphere. “Otto told me to look after Duke, who was the only black man in the area,” Rita Moriarty said. “Otto liked him enormously—we all did—and felt protective. Fortunately, there were no incidents.”
After the trouble-filled sets on Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, and Porgy and Bess, the location filming of Anatomy of a Murder in the barren Upper Peninsula of Michigan was virtually problem-free, the luckiest shoot in Preminger’s career. “Otto seemed to get along with everyone,” Rita Moriarty observed. “He felt sure of himself in Ishpeming, whereas he hadn’t been sure of himself in London on Saint Joan. He loved location shooting, and Anatomy was all location.” Potential problems never materialized. “George Scott was already a complete alcoholic when Otto hired him, and he and his wife, Colleen Dewhurst, also an extreme alcoholic, were drunk every night during the shoot,” Rita Moriarty said. “But Scott was never drunk on the set. Off the set James Stewart was awfully vague, really not there at all, but word-perfect on the job. Stewart had great respect for Otto.”15
In casting Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott, Preminger, as he often did, was taking a chance on newcomers, all of whom had challenging roles. Not once did he raise his voice, and rather than monitoring every gesture and intonation, as he had with Jean Seberg and Dorothy Dandridge, he kept his distance.
“He was not a hands-on director with actors,” Gazzara observed.
He was detached, diffident. His focus was not on his actors but on the exigencies of setting up the shots, and he had a very good eye. He talked much more to Sam Leavitt [the film’s cinematographer] than to any of us. He cast well; he had hired us because he thought we fulfilled his idea of the roles and he expected us to bring him everything. In the few moments we had together on-screen Lee and I worked out our relationship and motivations between ourselves— we supplied the subtext of resentment and suspicion between the characters. With Otto, it was a job: be on time and know your lines. I was used to a different approach because I was trained in the Method and had worked with Elia Kazan on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. With Gadg [Kazan], who always knew how to help an actor who was having trouble, you felt you had a friend. He put his arm around you and walked you off to the side. You were sh
owered with that warm Anatolian smile; with Otto, it was Germanic formality and no sense of a collaborative effort. He did not know how to talk to an actor in the actor’s own language, in the language of the actor’s craft, and I expect that’s why he got so frustrated when an actor wasn’t giving him what he wanted. I had the feeling he didn’t like actors. But I certainly didn’t dislike him; I just didn’t get to know him.16
“When Otto thought it was working, which I think is how he felt about all of us in our roles, he knew well enough to stay quiet,” George C. Scott said. “He left me almost entirely alone, in fact he almost didn’t say anything to me at all. I was kind of wondering: am I doing this right? The occasional eruption was with the technical people, not with the actors.”17
In this charmed shoot Preminger did not once attack the most vulnerable player, Kathryn Grant, cast in the pivotal role of the young woman who turns out to be the daughter of the murdered man. “She had a singsong delivery that was driving Otto wild,” Hope Bryce recalled. “She’s really not an actress, and as a person she was blank. She didn’t mix with the company and dined every night with a priest.”18 “I had heard Mr. Preminger was fearsome, but he wasn’t,” Kathryn Grant (Mrs. Bing Crosby) said. “I never saw him in that forbidding way. I just did my lines and he didn’t say anything.” Grant had a method of her own for reducing her fear of Preminger,
the most important producer-director I ever knew, a person with a great vision. Alice Faye, a friend of Bing’s who had worked with Otto [on Fallen Angel] and had had no trouble, gave me some encouragement before we started. “He has bad breath,” she told me, “and you can’t be afraid of someone with terrible breath.” Now I don’t know if he did—I never got close enough to find out—but once I had it in my mind I realized that he was just a person and I was no longer afraid. Mr. Preminger always treated me professionally. When I was in his office before filming, I informed him I was three months pregnant and he said nothing required of me would interfere with the pregnancy. He said the pregnancy might even have advantages: my breasts would be bigger! Maybe that’s why he was always nice to me.19
In handling Joseph Welch, Preminger remembered a rehearsal at the Theater in der Josefstadt in which Max Reinhardt had asked an amateur actor to move on a line. “Oh, if you want that you must get yourself a real actor,” the clever amateur had replied. “I was very careful while directing Joseph Welch never to make him move and talk at the same time,” Preminger noted.20
To avoid the inclement weather when production started at the end of March, Preminger had arranged beforehand to shoot all the interiors first. He began with the trial scenes, shot in sequence. The procedure benefited the actors, allowing for the kind of continuity rarely obtained in filming, and it also saved money—Otto didn’t have to pay actors to hang around when they weren’t needed. Toward the end of the shoot, however, the bubble of contentment surrounding the project almost burst because of a legal
The courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. Preminger shot the trial in sequence in the Marquette County Court House, the site of the actual trial on which the film is based.
battle begun in July 1958 between Preminger’s Carlyle Productions and Ray Stark’s Seven Arts. Each had claimed priority in having bought the screen rights to the novel. In October 1958 Stark had announced that he and a partner, Eliot Hyman, would also produce a stage version to be adapted by John van Druten (who died in December after having completed his dramatization). The following May, Stark, maintaining he had a signed agreement between van Druten and John Voelker “providing] for a sale and transfer of all motion picture rights to me,” said he was “surprised by Preminger’s plans since he approached me some time ago with the proposition to join me in the production of this film, which proposition I subsequently rejected.”21 For a moment, with Stark threatening to block Otto from releasing his film, it looked as if Preminger’s about-to-be victory would be snatched from him at the eleventh hour. Preminger pursued the matter in court and prevailed, the judge deciding that the right to produce a film of Voelker’s novel was his and his alone.
Although Otto put up an unflappable front, Ray Stark’s legal maneuverings gave him momentary pause. The prospect of a looming censorship hassle, however, delighted him. For the fourth time he would be playing a congenial role as a free-speech advocate, and once again he welcomed a row because he knew it would be good for business. The issue, as with The Moon Is Blue, was over language deemed “offensive” by a number of local censorship boards. The offending words were “rape” (uttered in Anatomy of a Murder more frequently than in any previous American film), “seduce,” “contraceptive,” “penetration,” and “panties” (the outcome of the trial hinges on a woman’s ripped undergarment). (Among the offended was James Stewart’s father, who berated his son for a scene in which he held up the panties. “My father said I shouldn’t have done it, and he warned his friends to stay away from the film,” the actor recalled.)22 Several dozen local boards made threats, but in the event only the one in Chicago took action. In the middle of the Detroit premiere, Nat Rudich, Otto’s assistant, rushed into the theater to inform him that the board was demanding five cuts before they would allow the film to open. Otto flew to Chicago the next day to confront the city’s Catholic chief of police, who said he would ignore four of the objections but would not budge in demanding the removal of “contraceptive” because he didn’t want his eighteen-year-old daughter to hear it. “If I had an eighteen-year-old daughter, sir, I would teach her that word and explain to her carefully all about it,” Otto replied.23 The next morning a district court judge ordered the film shown without any cuts. “The film had no difficulty anywhere else,” as Otto reported, perhaps a little disappointed.24
Although he did not publicize it, according to Wendell Mayes Preminger did in fact agree to make one cut demanded by the Production Code Administration office. “He called me, as he always did when he wanted to make a change, to say we had to change the word ‘penetration’ to ‘violation,’ ” Mayes remembered. “He said, ‘That’s the only thing I gave on.’ That wasn’t much, though, and for its time the film really was quite daring in the way sex was discussed. Probably only Otto Preminger would have gotten away with it.”25 (Preminger was to have two other battles over attempts to
James Stewart and Duke Ellington, seated together on a piano bench, for a scene in Anatomy of a Murder. Preminger refused to delete the scene for South African exhibitors.
mutilate his film. Shortly after the opening he received a call from a film agent in South Africa wanting to excise a scene in which James Stewart sits on a piano bench with Duke Ellington. “It’s only 15 seconds and not too important,” the agent claimed. “Well, it’s important to me,” Preminger responded. “My movie isn’t a South African film, it’s an American one. You either run the picture as it is, or you don’t run it at all.” The agent continued to call for six years, and each time received the same answer.26 In 1965, when Otto saw a television screening of the film with thirteen interruptions for twenty-nine commercials, he took the matter to court, claiming that his contractual right of first cut also applied to television. “It is not my film anymore; it is a misrepresentation of my film, a fraud committed against the public,” Preminger argued in a press conference on December 2, 1965. On January 19, 1966, however, Justice Arthur G. Klein of the New York State Supreme Court ruled against Preminger, determining “final cut” does not apply to television showings.)
Preminger was guest of honor at a state-sponsored banquet when Anatomy of a Murder was named “Michigan product of the year.” The sixty-five-foot-long backdrop with the Saul Bass logo was designed by the films art director, Boris Leven.
On June 5, only twenty-one days after shooting was completed, Preminger, as he had said he would, presented Anatomy of a Murder at a preview screening in San Francisco. The enthusiastic response was echoed the following month when the film opened in selected theaters on July 1 to the most positive notices of Preminger’s career. “He
ws magnificently to a line of dramatic but reasonable behavior and proper procedure in a court” (the New York Times, July 2); “nigh flawless” (Saturday Review, July 10); “a beautifully drawn battle, full of neat little triumphs on each side” (the Nation, July 11); “forceful, enthralling” (the Los Angeles Times, July 2).
Opening within days after the premiere of Porgy and Bess, Anatomy of a Murder reversed Preminger’s recent lackluster track record. As the director of two major films, Preminger was again at the top. He saturated newspapers, television, and radio, trumpeting his own film, but he also complied with Goldwyn’s requests to promote Porgy and Bess. The differences he had had with Goldwyn were forgotten as he spoke to reporters about the “honor” of directing the great producer’s final film. In some of the public appearances he made for Goldwyn, Otto appeared with Dorothy, looking a little shaky but trying still to project the aura of a Hollywood diva. When he was in Beverly Hills, Otto enjoyed driving back and forth between the two theaters, the Warner Beverly and the Carthay Circle, where the films were playing to full houses. After some screenings of Anatomy of a Murder, exiting audiences were delighted to find Otto holding court in the lobby of the Warner Beverly, genuinely interested in finding out what they thought of the verdict that the jury in the film had arrived at.
The summer of 1959 was the high-water mark of Preminger’s career, and the filmmaker luxuriated in the attention and the praise. He was proud of the work he had done for Goldwyn under difficult circumstances and of his accomplishment with Anatomy of a Murder. He had not needed the critics to tell him that in that movie everything works: the story, the acting, the location settings, Sam Leavitt’s black-and-white cinematography, Duke Ellington’s jazz score. To be sure, this cool film about a hot subject is a triumphant display of all the filmmaker’s strengths: his objectivity, his visual fluency, his resistance to sentimentality, his attraction to ambivalence in characterization and theme, his control of every element of the mise-en-scène.
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