Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)

Directed by Otto Preminger. Written by Wendell Mayes.

“People aren’t just good, people aren’t just bad. People are many things,” says small town lawyer Paul Biegler in Otto Preminger’s all-time great courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder. He’s saying it to a woman he’s trying to convince to testify on behalf of his client, a soldier accused of shooting and killing a man. The soldier claims the man raped his wife, so why the hard sell? It’s because the man in question is the woman’s father, someone she adores and believes to be a devoted parent.  

Anatomy of a Murder is about what’s true and who’s innocent. With maturity and ingenuity, Preminger and writer Mayes tease us with the impossibility of knowing, and show us the pitfalls of condemning or lionizing a person based on what part of them they show to us. Person to person, person to public, morality and our biased perceptions will take the black-and-white letter of the law and make it one long gray smear. 

James Stewart is never better as Paul Biegler. He’s a former district attorney now semi-employed lawyer who spends more time fishing, drinking bourbon and playing smooth jazz piano than taking cases. He’s talked into defending Lt. Frederick Manion, though, who doesn’t deny killing the barman by shooting him five times, but instead claims temporary insanity made him do it. Not hard to imagine in light of the heinous crime he says the barman committed.

A slightly rusty lawyer, and a defendant who has readily admitted to committing the crime he’s accused of? Doesn’t look great, but as the case unfolds, the facts are sometimes what matters least. 

Anatomy of a Murder has scintillating writing that absolutely crackles on screen. From the light-hearted banter between Biegler and his secretary to the rapid-fire verbal assault that lawyers unleash at witnesses and each other. If that’s all there was to Preminger’s film, it’d be enough. 

But Mayes’ script runs deep and has its worthwhile roots in dilemmas recognizable to all. As we slowly learn more about these characters, either from watching them, or the testimony of others, we, like the jury, must decide for ourselves what to believe, and the genius of Anatomy of a Murder is that it insists on its audience making up its own mind and feeling the doubt that comes with any decision of this magnitude. That requires believable three-dimensional characters and once again Mayes delivers based on the source novel by Robert Traver. 

You’re left feeling both hoodwinked, but also trusted. I say trusted because so many movies today seek to pacify us with clear outcomes and black-white divides of who’s right and who’s wrong, practically manhandling our jaws as they show us how to chew on what’s shown to us. There’s elation in not knowing what, and who, to believe in Preminger’s film, because it forces us look inside ourselves too as we take it in, and question our own biases and assumptions about these events and characters. 

Movies can be many things. Entertaining. Provocative. Thoughtful. Devastating. Anatomy of a Murder is all of it and more, and an example of a movie where exacting direction and pitch-perfect performances make good on the stellar script placed in their hands.