Otto Preminger's 1959 "Anatomy of a Murder," just released on DVD (Criterion Collection, Blu-ray $39.95, DVD $29.95, not rated), becomes one of the great courtroom dramas by systematically undermining most of the pleasures and reassurances that the genre provides.

Though Preminger, the son of a prosperous Viennese lawyer who had been a public prosecutor during the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, portrays the workings of the legal system with respect and even reverence, the film does not perform the genre's usual function of returning a sense of order and security to a community that has been thrown into chaos by a violent, anti-social act.

Instead, Preminger deftly and undemonstratively evokes the shortcomings of the system, its failure to account for aspects of human behavior that defy rationality, that contradict self-interest and confound tidy chains of cause and effect.

Rather than bringing the truth to light, expunging evil and making the world sensible and readable again, the trial in "Anatomy of a Murder" leads to a verdict but not to a resolution. The fundamental mysteries - who did what to whom and why - remain open.

This worldview belongs less to Perry Mason than to Michelangelo Antonioni, whose more aggressively open-ended "L'Avventura" would scandalize the movie world a year later.

Based on a best-selling novel by Robert Traver (the pseudonym of John D. Voelker, a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court ) and set and largely

Paul Biegler (James Stewart), a district attorney who was turned out of office after a decade, is hired by the cocksure lieutenant to mount an insanity defense, based on Manion's claim that was in the grip of an "irresistible impulse" when he methodically shot the man who attacked his wife.

But even as Biegler argues his case, sparring with a hotshot state's attorney (George C. Scott), slips and discrepancies emerge, suggesting that Manion is not all that impulsive, his wife not all that pure and the victim not all that nefarious.

The courtroom sequences alone take up the length of an average movie in "Anatomy of a Murder," which luxuriates in its 160-minute running time, accumulating a dense welter of novelistic details: the supremely self-controlled Biegler's taste for the spontaneity of jazz (the score was composed by Duke Ellington, who also makes a cameo appearance); Manion's dandyish ivory-barreled cigarette holder; Laura's taste in lacy undergarments.

The film is full of scenes of smart people sizing up one another and verbal exchanges that suggest chess games more than conversations, including a turn on the witness stand by Kathryn Grant. Throughout, Preminger maintains a studiously neutral perspective, framing most scenes as balanced two-shots and allowing dialogue sequences to play out uninflected by confrontational cross-cutting.

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Preminger's 'Anatomy of a Murder' still a killer study of the justice system