ANATOMY OF A MURDER Criterion Collection / 1959 / 161 min. / NR

Otto Preminger was a bald, teutonic film director with an outsized personality he put to good use during his heyday. Not only was Preminger a regular raconteur on the TV talk show circuit in the 1960s and 70s, he lent his acting skills to projects such as Billy Wilders STALAG 17 and played the villainous Mr. Freeze in 1966 on the BATMAN television series. An migr from Austria to the United States, Preminger directed theatre and several little-seen films before he broke through to A-list status in 1944, directing the hit movie, LAURA.

From then on, Otto Preminger worked steadily, building a reputation for tackling controversial material that pushed the boundaries of taste and censorship. Like many directors of his era, when the New Hollywood exploded in the 1960s with films like THE GRADUATE, BONNIE AND CLYDE and EASY RIDER, Preminger started to appear more and more like a dinosaur mired in the muck of the past. He tried to adapt to the counterculture, most notoriously with SKIDOO, a 1968 fiasco with Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon and Groucho Marx as God. But by then, Premingers best work was clearly behind him. And looking back in the rearview mirror, his artistic pinnacle might very well have been 1959s ANATOMY OF A MURDER.

A courtroom drama (a popular film genre before this kind of storytelling moved almost exclusively to network television), ANATOMY OF A MURDER is notable for several reasons. The screenplay was adapted from a novel by John D. Voelker (who based it on an actual case on which he served as defense attorney) by frequent Preminger collaborator, Wendell Mayes. In the story, struggling small town lawyer Paul Biegler (James Stewart) takes on the defense of surly soldier, Lt. Fred Manion (Ben Gazzara), accused of killing a man whom he claims raped his stunningly sexy wife, Laura (stunningly sexy Lee Remick). In the course of the trial, the attorneys talk openly about the presence or absence of sperm on the alleged rape victim, as well as the status of her panties. Though this kind of dialogue can be heard any time of day on various LAW AND ORDERs and CSIs, this was shocking material for audiences to be hearing in a studio movie in 1959.

If you find the already-mentioned cast intriguing and they are all excellent then add to that Eve Arden as Bieglers wise-cracking secretary, Arthur OConnell as his alcoholic but still legally sharp attorney best friend, Orson Bean as an official witness, and in an early role, the great George C. Scott as prosecutor Claude Dancer. The film is an acting tour de force, worth checking out on that level alone.

Preminger chose to shoot the movie in the location where the novel was set and the real-life story took place. He brought his cast and crew to a small town on Michigans Upper Peninsula, and the setting gives the picture a feeling of verisimilitude that could never be accomplished on a studio back lot. His other daring choice was to hire the American genius jazz composer and bandleader, Duke Ellington, to score the movie. While jazz-influenced scores were not uncommon in the 1950s, they usually graced smaller budget noir movies in urban settings. Here, Ellingtons music makes a huge contribution to the mood and texture of the film, and the Duke, himself, shows up, sharing the piano keys with Jimmy Stewart in a local bar.

ANATOMY OF A MURDER is really about the American legal process. Manions guilt or innocence is never truly established in the audiences mind. But juries have to make life-and-death decisions based on evidence presented by skilled and flawed attorneys, who cannot help but approach their jobs with their own human biases. What Preminger portrays so beautifully in the film is the very ambiguity that defines our legal system. Clearly 2/3 of this 161 minute film takes place in the confines of the courtroom, and Preminger never ceases to have his camera in the right place to visually convey the shifting dynamics of the story. The courtroom becomes a stage with the battling lawyers the key actors. By todays standards, the movie is a bit long-winded, but ANATOMY OF A MURDER is a landmark film that takes an incisive look at American jurisprudence.

THE DISC A beautiful black and white 1080p transfer from the Criterion Collection. This is a state-of-the-art video presentation.

A single-channel LPCM 1.0 mono track and a DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track are both available. They both sound fantastic, with the surround track providing a bit more dynamic range, especially when it comes to Duke Ellingtons landmark score.

EXTRAS A typically comprehensive set of supplements from Criterion, including:

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Anatomy of a Murder (Blu-ray)