Like his later epics on institutions (the Catholic church in The Cardinal, the federal government in Advise and Consent, the Navy in In Harms Way), at heart Anatomy of a Murder is about procedure. With patient detail the film documents the way lawyers assemble a defense case and the means, the rules and regulations, by which a trial is conducted and courtroom decorum is maintained. Although the film’s immediate focus, the trial of a man accused of killing a bartender in a small town, may seem narrow, ultimately Anatomy of a Murder engages large issues about law and the process of trial by jury. The film asks the audience to consider how the American system defines and determines guilt and innocence, to what extent the law can be manipulated to protect or punish the accused and to uphold or obscure the truth. In order to arrive at their own conclusions, spectators, like the jurors in the film, are placed in the position of assessing the conflicting testimony of equivocal witnesses. In its respect for due process and its love of the courtroom as a privileged site of dramatic conflict, this is a lawyer’s film—a tribute to American jurisprudence tendered by a doctor of law from the University of Vienna.
Like the film itself, its protagonist, defense attorney Paul Biegler, regards the law as flexible, imperfect, fascinating, and ultimately indestructible. A die-hard pragmatist, capable of seeing around any legal issue, Biegler takes on Lieutenant Manion as a client simply because the case and its cast of
George C. Scott, playing the prosecuting attorney, questions the arrogant defendant (Ben Gazzara). Joseph N. Welch is the judge.
characters interest him. He doesn’t like Manion and is far from convinced of his innocence—all he knows for sure is that Manion shot the bartender, Barney Quill. Yet Biegler is enticed by the legal issues the case raises. The point he pursues with academic rigor is whether or not the lieutenant killed the bartender when he was in a state of mind that under the provisions of the law might make him appear to be innocent to a jury. Biegler isn’t Perry Mason, alight with moral fervor and determined to see justice vindicated— that kind of hero held little interest for Preminger, who, as here, is typically drawn to the compromises and contradictions that govern human behavior. Biegler is a regular guy with no romantic attachments. Off the job he likes to play jazz and to fish, and to his work as a lawyer he brings a logical temperament as well as a knack for improvising—precisely the traits that make him good at devising strategies for catching fish and riffing at the piano.
Self-contained offstage, Biegler in the courtroom knows how to turn up the volume. He’s crafty. On demand he can become boisterous or sarcastic. And beneath his masquerade as a seemingly ingratiating country bumpkin he can cut the legal mustard second to none. One of the film’s wisest observations, to be sure, is that since trials are a kind of performance art, cases are likely to be won by the most able actor. And as the film’s starring attraction,
James Stewart, as the story needs him to be, is indeed the best actor on view. In the courtroom scenes, engaging in a sly dialogue with the upstanding protagonists he had played earlier in his career, he reveals “James Stewart,” idealized all-American, as a performance, an actor’s mask. Stewart lets us see him put on and take off the persona that made him a star. In a film like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Stewart is unshakably sincere; here, his sincerity is qualified, even questioned. (The film’s portrait of lawyers as actors anticipates by some four decades the appalling public spectacle of Johnny Cochran “performing” racial outrage to the primarily black jury that acquitted O. J. Simpson, Cochran’s obviously guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt client, in a murder case that had nothing to do with race.)
As the niftily named prosecuting attorney, Claude Dancer, George C. Scott also struts like a seasoned player, an agile “dancer” indeed. Light on his feet, Dancer moves and thinks quickly. In a delicious scene, as he takes the measure of the forever hot-to-trot Laura Manion during cross-examination, he moves in toward her to caress her with his voice, lowering it to a seductive purr. From time to time, clearly amused by his own theatrics, Dancer smiles surreptitiously to himself.
The defendant, Lieutenant Manion, also puts on a show, one with an unexpected script. Refusing to enact the cliché-ridden role of a man who bristles with indignation because he has been accused of a crime he did not commit, Manion, cocky and insolent—he smokes cigarettes through a holder—makes no attempt to perform innocence for Biegler. He seems so indifferent toward his wife that entering a plea of temporary insanity—the only way that Biegler believes he can win acquittal for his client—becomes problematic. How would such an icily self-contained man have been capable of a crime of passion? And yet, as Biegler observes, the tightly wound lieutenant is jealous of his wife’s flirtations, has a hair-trigger temper, and might well have snapped just before killing Quill. Indeed, Manion loses his temper twice. First, in jail, he lashes out at another prisoner, and then in the courtroom he screams out when the con testifies falsely against him. Enticingly veiled, Ben Gazzara plays Manion as an unknowable character, a man knotted by inner tensions. “Of course the guy was guilty, but as an actor you play the opposite,” Ben Gazzara said. “I thought of him as innocent, a wonderful person. As an actor, you take the side of the character.”
Laura, Manion’s far too seductive wife, is another ambivalent character who often seems, like the lieutenant, to be behaving inappropriately. Worried that her sultriness will antagonize the jury, Biegler forces Laura to dress in a prim suit, to wear glasses, and to put her hair up—whenever she appears in the courtroom, she too is acting. Since Lee Remick has such a likable presence, viewers may be predisposed to accept her character’s testimony despite her masquerade. Sexually provocative, favoring every man but her husband with smiles and wiggles—her husband may be the only man she is afraid of—Laura seems more likely to have been a consenting partner in an illicit rendezvous than a victim of rape. Yet she claims Barney Quill took her against her will. She also claims Quill gave her a black eye, and the dark glasses she wears add another barrier to reading the character clearly. But it also seems reasonable that her husband could have struck her in a moment of rage. In a charged private moment during the trial Manion repels Laura’s attempt to light his cigarette, and the two exchange a poisonous look that evokes a dark history, an aura of something unspoken between them that we will never find out about. Deciphering the motives of this untrustworthy couple who nonetheless may be telling the truth provides the primary interpretive challenge for the jurors on-screen and in the audience.
Mary Pilant, the murdered man’s daughter, is also hard to read. Like the Manions, Mary doesn’t appear to be responding to circumstances in the expected way. Her father has been murdered, yet she seems oddly detached, as if she is no more than an employee at the hotel that Barney owned (which in fact is the character’s status in the novel). Preminger’s decision to make Mary Barney’s daughter (a fact that Barney had concealed) adds another dark possibility to the story’s proliferating ambiguities. At the trial, when Mary produces Laura’s panties, which her father had hurled down the laundry chute at the hotel, she may be offering proof of his guilt or perhaps hinting at some secret ceremony the two of them might have shared. Like the other central characters in the crime, Mary Pilant is equivocal, not quite “right.” Preminger shrewdly uses Kathryn Grant’s glassy-eyed, matte, starlet-in-a-B-movie performance to encourage the viewer’s suspicion that Mary, too, is a character with secrets.
In contrast, Biegler’s two assistants, his soused partner Parnell (Arthur O’Connell), who redeems himself by helping Biegler to win the case, and his devoted, down-to-earth secretary, Maida (Eve Arden), who works even when her boss is behind in paying her salary, have nothing to hide. Parnell’s love of the law permeates the film. For this failed lawyer working on the case is therapeutic. When he finds a precedent that might exculpate their client—in Michigan, if a defendant can be shown to have committed a crime under an irresistible impulse, there is reasonable doubt about his guilt—he reacts like a scientist confronted wi
th a momentous discovery. The scene near the end, of Biegler, Parnell, and Maida awaiting the verdict, is surely among the most deftly drawn pieces of local-color realism in the
Defense attorneys (James Stewart and Arthur O’Connell) and their secretary (Eve Arden) await the verdict in Anatomy of a Murder. Performed by three great actors, the scene represents the finest work of Preminger’s career.
history of American filmmaking. Paul doodles on the piano; Parnell praises trial by jury as a system that most of the time almost miraculously seems to work; Maida, pouring coffee, hopes for a new typewriter on which all the keys work.
Preminger’s avoidance throughout of psychological and visual cliché culminates in the choices he makes at the end of the trial. He eliminates summations and stages the verdict in an unorthodox way. As the not-guilty verdict is announced, Lieutenant Manion (Laura, oddly yet somehow fittingly, isn’t even in the courtroom) is seen in long shot in an all-inclusive wide-angle composition. (Biegler does not stand up with his client.) In order to encourage the audience to consider larger issues about the law and the jury system, Preminger ingeniously withholds the conventional reaction shot close-ups that would reveal how Manion and his legal team are responding to the verdict. On strictly legal grounds—if in fact he did kill Barney Quill under an irresistible impulse, the law is not obligated to distinguish right from wrong—Manion may not be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But, as the filmmaker hoped, many viewers do not agree with the jury’s decision. To Preminger, lawyer and proud American, an occasional miscarriage of justice is the price to be paid for the system of trial by jury that is unavoidably imperfect but that most of the time arrives at the right decision. From Preminger’s and the film’s point of view, the refusal to rush to judgment, implicit in the injunction to assign guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, is a necessary prophylactic, salutary and even noble. Preminger’s own deep respect for American jurisprudence is reflected in the character who is the highest representative of the law in the film, the presiding judge, played with unassailable courtliness, urbanity, and rectitude by Joseph N. Welch.
(In the fall of 1962, when Preminger accepted an invitation from the Union of Soviet Picture Makers in Moscow, he asked if he could bring a copy of Anatomy of a Murder because he wanted to see how Russian audiences would respond. He was interested to discover that they had no problem with the sexual content but were puzzled, or angry, that Manion had won acquittal since “obviously” he was a mean man who had not killed under “an irresistible impulse.” “The evidence was not conclusive,” Preminger explained, trying to outline the American system of justice. “And in our country a man is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.”27 As Hope recalled, “Russian students didn’t understand why it was necessary to have the trial; they felt the character should just have been beheaded.”28)
Preminger’s refusal to satisfy audience expectation—almost any other director would have provided a close-up on Lieutenant Manion during or right after the verdict—sets up the film’s ironic coda. Manion, released from prison, disappears, claiming an “irresistible impulse” to leave town without paying his lawyers. In the last shot of this sentiment-free movie, Preminger provides a rare close-up as the camera moves in to examine Laura’s floozie shoes, which in her hasty departure she has tossed into a garbage can. Leaving behind her shoes, has Laura also perhaps abandoned her life as a good-time gal?
Although he moves in for an occasional close-up, especially in the trial scenes, and in the wry final shot, Preminger typically places the camera in the position of an observant spectator who knows the value of discretion and of maintaining a certain distance. Like the law, the objective camera refuses to come to quick decisions about the characters. And from the comparative safety and anonymity afforded by medium-to-long group shots, viewers are allowed to arrive at their own conclusions. Preminger relies more on editing than he usually does, but he uses few one-shots. Characters are almost always seen in relation to other characters within the same frame. One-shots, for the most part, appear only in early scenes when Biegler questions Manion and Laura—isolating the two characters in frames of their own underlines the lawyer’s doubts about them, his feeling of separation from them.
Preminger handles the location settings with restraint. Sam Leavitt’s sparing shots of a wintry landscape avoid being picturesque. Interiors—the courtroom, a roadside bar, a hospital, Biegler’s house and office, Barney’s hotel—look used. Everything seems true, from the battered fridge and floral wallpaper in Biegler’s house to the worn-out typewriter Maida complains about. Yet the reality isn’t paraded for its own sake, and the film never becomes a museum exhibit of an Upper Peninsula community as seen by outsiders.
Preminger uses Duke Ellington’s score with the same tact. “Most musicians are overzealous: instead of rendering the ambiance, the general feeling of the scene, they put the scene into music and try to write a symphony,” Preminger observed. “The ensemble is then false, because you have two scenes, one played by the actors, the other played by the music. The score should not be a go-between in telling the story, it should only underline it.”29 And indeed, following Preminger’s orders, Ellington’s terse score enriches the action without ever intruding on or dominating it. In a smart move, reserving music for “offstage,” Preminger does not use any underscoring in the courtroom scenes. Jazz expresses Biegler’s cool way of thinking as he assembles his case; underlines Laura’s sexuality, Manion’s disdain, Par-nell’s drinking. It is heard in a roadside bar, in a hotel restaurant, and in a few driving scenes. The film ends on a wailing trombone shrieking at the spectacle of Laura’s shoes in a garbage can.
It’s unlikely that there has ever been a more lucid, more unexpected, and more entertaining movie about the law. After a succession of critical and box-office failures that might well have unnerved a less self-assured personality, Preminger rebounded to deliver the most poised work of his career. Anatomy of a Murder, a film that sets the viewer thinking because it challenges complacency and refuses to come up with easy or pious answers, is one of the great American movies. The film grossed over four million dollars in the United States and earned over a million in foreign engagements. Preminger, who had profit participation, earned over half a million, a substantial sum at the time. The film earned Academy Award nominations for James Stewart for best actor; Arthur O’Connell and George C. Scott for best supporting actor; Louis Loeffler for best film editing; and Wendell Mayes for best adapted screenplay. The film was nominated for best picture (Preminger’s only nomination in this category) but, unaccountably, Preminger was not nominated for best director.
TWELVE
In the Promised Land
In May and June 1959, as he was preparing for the openings of Anatomy of a Murder and conferring with Sam Goldwyn about promotional appearances on behalf of Porgy and Bess, Preminger began working full time on Exodus. On no other film were his stamina and his stubbornness more essential: in order to shoot a story of the founding of Israel entirely on location, he would require the cooperation of a country that had much more on its mind than participating in the making of a Hollywood super-spectacle.
Otto’s initial plan was for Leon Uris to adapt his novel into a screenplay. But any kind of collaboration between the volatile author and the equally hotheaded director was destined to fail. Otto was pro-Israel, but he did not share Uris’s hard-core Zionist stance, and in his film he was determined to modify the novelist’s anti-British and anti-Arab bias. Another obstacle was Uris’s clunky dialogue, lacking cinematic swiftness as well as a convincing illusion of characters speaking to each other. Preminger claimed that he “labored [with Uris] through almost a third” of a first draft before removing him.1 Uris, however, maintained that he “never wrote a line. I was taken off the picture before I wrote one single line of a screenplay, because of a personality clash—a moral clash. Otto wanted to soften my treatment of the British and Arab characters, an approach I could not condone
or tolerate. I sensed trouble the moment I met Otto, a man hated by everybody. I did not write one line, and there isn’t a line of dialogue from the novel in the film. After he removed me, I never spoke to Preminger again.”2
“Uris did write part of a script,” Hope insisted.
But he didn’t want to change a word. He didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, that films are a different medium from novels. Whatever he wrote was unusable, totally bad. How do you tell him? Otto respected Uris as a historian and for the terrific amount of research he had done—he loved the story Uris told; that’s why he wanted to make the film. When he told him he would have to replace him, Leon was enraged and he never stopped hating Otto and me. A few weeks after the film was released we were invited to a state dinner at the White House, where, in the receiving line, guests were lined up alphabetically; Uris was close to Preminger. Otto went over to him and said, “Hello, Leon, how are you?” and Uris turned his back, refusing to speak.3
After jettisoning Uris in early May, Preminger quickly hired Albert Maltz, a blacklisted writer living in Mexico. Maltz had been working on the script for several weeks when Preminger, accompanied by Hope, visited him in mid-June. Preminger saw evidence of massive research but was disheartened to find that Maltz had not yet written a single line. If he was to keep to his schedule—he planned to begin shooting in Israel in March 1960—he felt he had no option but to fire Maltz. At this point Ingo suggested one of his clients, Dalton Trumbo, another blacklisted writer who for years had been working under pseudonyms and who was known for being speedy and reliable. From Otto’s point of view, Trumbo had another asset: he was not Jewish, and Preminger was hoping that he would tell the story of the founding of the Jewish state with more objectivity than Uris. Once hired, Trumbo worked quickly.
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