Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Official trailer

The Best Trial Film Ever Made

Anatomy of a Murder is the best courtroom film ever made, and I don’t think it’s close. It’s two and a half hours long, most of it set in a single courtroom, and it’s gripping from beginning to end. It’s also the truest trial film I know about what trials really are: contests between lawyers, each trying to tell the jury a better story, with the truth left to fend for itself.

Otto Preminger directed it in 1959, from Wendell Mayes’ screenplay adapting a bestselling novel by Robert Traver. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won none, and it has only grown in reputation since. I give it a 10. It’s clever, funny, morally complicated and far more frank than any Hollywood film of its time, and it still feels modern.

The Case

Paul Biegler is a former district attorney in a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who lost his job at the last election and now spends his time fishing, playing jazz records and not practicing much law. He’s approached by Laura Manion, the wife of an army lieutenant, Frederick Manion, who has shot and killed a local tavern owner named Barney Quill.

Manion doesn’t deny it. He says Quill raped his wife. When he learned of it, he went to the bar and shot Quill five times. Biegler takes the case, partly for the money and partly because his old friend Parnell tells him he’s wasting his life. The problem is simple: Manion killed Quill in cold blood, an hour after hearing about the attack. There’s no legal defense for that. Unless Biegler can find one.

The story is based on a real case from 1952, in which the novel’s author, John D. Voelker, writing as Robert Traver, was the defense lawyer. Voelker later became a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Much of the film’s legal detail comes straight from his experience, and lawyers who watch it today still praise how accurately it shows the tactics and the tedium of a real trial.

The Lecture

The film’s most important scene, and its most morally ambiguous, comes early. Biegler, meeting Manion in jail, explains the law of murder to him: that there are only a few legal defenses to a killing. Manion’s story, as it stands, fits none of them. He doesn’t tell Manion what to say. He tells him what the law allows, and waits.

Manion, after a pause, remembers that he must have been out of his mind with rage. Biegler has just coached his client into an insanity defense, known as irresistible impulse, without technically telling him to lie. Jimmy Stewart plays the scene with a folksy, sleepy innocence that makes it all the more unsettling.

The whole film turns on it. Biegler is our hero, played by America’s most trusted movie star, and he’s not a crusader for truth. He’s a very good lawyer doing what very good lawyers do, and the film invites us to admire him and to be uneasy about him at the same time.

Jimmy Stewart

Stewart is wonderful as Biegler, and it’s the Stewart performance I’d show first to anybody who thinks he only played saints. He plays a country lawyer who seems slow, gentle and a little lazy, and who’s in fact the sharpest mind in the room. He uses the folksy manner as a weapon, playing dumb, asking innocent questions and letting his opponents underestimate him. Watching him play dumb in front of people who should know better is the chief pleasure of the film for me.

It’s a clever use of Stewart’s screen persona, and one of the boldest casting decisions of its era. Audiences in 1959 saw him as the embodiment of American decency, the man from It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Preminger uses that trust against them. Biegler is decent, in his way, and he’s also a manipulator who bends the rules as far as they’ll go.

Stewart’s own father reportedly objected to the film’s frank language and took out a newspaper advertisement urging people not to see it. It’s a lovely irony that the actor most tied to wholesome American values gave one of his finest performances in the most daring film of his career, and it’s a performance that holds up better than many of his more famous roles.

The Prosecutor

George C. Scott plays Claude Dancer, a sharp, cold assistant attorney general sent from the state capital to help the local prosecutor, and he’s electric. Scott was in his early thirties and almost unknown, and his performance, all controlled menace and cutting courtesy, announced him as a major actor. He barely raises his voice, and every word lands.

The duels between Stewart and Scott are the heart of the trial, and they’re the scenes I’d happily watch on a loop. Biegler plays the country bumpkin, Dancer plays the big-city professional, and each keeps probing for the other’s weak spots. Their cross-examinations teach you how to trap a witness, how to plant an idea in a jury’s mind and how to recover when somebody springs a trap on you.

Scott was nominated for the Oscar for this role, as was Arthur O’Connell. Neither won. Scott went on to Patton and a career as a great American actor, and he famously refused the Oscar he won for Patton a decade later. Watching this early performance, it’s easy to see the force and intelligence that would make him such a formidable screen presence for the next thirty years.

Laura Manion

Lee Remick plays Laura Manion, and she’s the film’s great mystery. She’s flirtatious, careless, attractive and far too friendly with strangers, and her husband is jealous and violent. The prosecution wants the jury to believe she’s a woman who invited trouble, and the film doesn’t make it easy to know what to think.

Remick plays her with a mixture of vulnerability and provocation that keeps the audience off balance throughout, and it’s the performance that made her a star. We never see what happened between her and Quill. We only hear her account, and Manion’s, and the evidence. Whether she was attacked, whether she was having an affair, whether her husband’s jealousy is the real motive: the film leaves all of it deliberately unclear.

Ben Gazzara plays Manion as sullen, arrogant and possibly dangerous, and the film never allows the audience to like him. That’s what makes the case so uncomfortable. Biegler is defending a man he doesn’t trust, on behalf of a wife he doesn’t fully believe, using a defense he half invented, and he does it brilliantly.

Frank Talk

In 1959, Anatomy of a Murder shocked audiences with its language. The trial involves rape, and the characters talk about it plainly, using words like rape, sperm, penetration and contraceptive that had never been heard in a Hollywood film. The most famous controversy concerned a pair of panties found at the scene, and the judge’s attempt to find an acceptable word for them in court.

The film was briefly banned in Chicago, where the mayor objected to its language, and a court overturned the ban. Preminger had been fighting the Production Code for years, and Anatomy of a Murder was one of the films that helped break it. Its frankness is how a real rape trial sounds, and the film insists that the audience hear it.

Judge Weaver

Joseph N. Welch, who wasn’t an actor at all, plays the judge, Judge Weaver. He was the Boston lawyer who had famously confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, asking whether he had no sense of decency. Preminger cast him because he wanted a real lawyer’s authority on the bench.

Welch is wonderful: dry, patient, gently humorous and completely in control of his courtroom. His handling of the panties problem, suggesting a word that won’t embarrass anyone, is one of the film’s funniest moments. It’s a small, perfect performance, and it gives the trial a solid foundation of realism.

There’s a quiet irony in his casting, too. The man who had stood up to the most notorious bully in American politics now presides over a trial in which both lawyers use every trick they know, and he keeps them both in line with a raised eyebrow and a mild remark.

Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington wrote the score, one of the first major Hollywood film scores by a Black composer. That’s a revelation: moody, jazzy and sophisticated, it gives the film a restless, modern atmosphere quite unlike the orchestral scores of the time. Ellington also appears briefly as a bandleader called Pie-Eye, playing piano with Stewart at a roadhouse.

Saul Bass designed the opening titles, a jagged, cut-out silhouette of a body falling apart into pieces, and the poster, and both are among the most famous in film history. Between Ellington’s music and Bass’s design, the film feels cool and contemporary in a way few courtroom dramas ever have.

The score also does something clever with the story. Biegler is a jazz fan who plays piano, and the music ties him to a world of improvisation and nerve that matches how he practices law. He plays it by ear, and he’s very good at it. I adore the roadhouse scene with Ellington at the piano beside Stewart, because that brief moment tells you more about Biegler than any speech could.

Upper Peninsula

Preminger shot the film on location in and around Marquette and Ishpeming, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the real case had taken place. The courtroom is the real Marquette County courthouse, and many of the extras were local residents. The locations give the film the look and feel of real small-town life: cold, remote, slow and full of people who know each other’s business.

This is a world away from Hollywood’s usual glossy courtrooms. The town, the tavern, the trailer park where the Manions live and Biegler’s cluttered office all feel true to life, and they make the case feel like something that happened to real people in a real place.

Preminger’s camera is patient and unshowy throughout, letting scenes play in long takes with the actors moving around the frame. It’s the style of a director who trusts his material and his cast, and it gives the courtroom scenes the feeling of watching a real trial unfold in real time.

The Ending

The jury returns its verdict. I won’t give it away. The final scene is as cynical and perfect as any ending in film. Biegler and Parnell drive out to the Manions’ trailer to collect their fee, and discover that the couple have skipped town without paying. Manion has left a note, explaining that an irresistible impulse seized him.

That’s a joke. It’s also the film’s final word on its own story. A client who learned exactly what Biegler taught him has turned Biegler’s clever defense back on him. We never learn the truth about what happened between Laura and Quill, or whether Manion was really out of his mind. We only know that the law has done its work. Nobody involved has come out of it clean.

Craft Note

How well does Anatomy of a Murder (1959) hold up?

Absolutely. It’s a 10, and I’d call it the best courtroom film ever made without a second thought. It runs long, and I wouldn’t trim a minute. What lifts it above every other trial picture I know is the nerve of that ending, a hero who wins by bending the law and then gets beaten with his own trick. Watch it for Stewart and Scott, for Ellington’s score and for a trial that leaves you, like the jury, never quite sure of the truth.

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