Pun Salad

As I type, Anatomy of a Murder clings to a spot on IMDB's best 250 movies of all time, at #244. It had its fiftieth anniversary this year.

It's Jimmy Stewart's movie, and (to a lesser extent) Lee Remick's. Jimmy plays small-town lawyer Paul Biegler, recently voted out of the prosecutor's office, content with fishing in the waters of Michigan's scenic Upper Peninsula. Biegler's semi-retirement is shattered when he's roped into playing defense attorney for an Army lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara). Manion shot (five times) a bar owner who had allegedly raped and beaten Mrs. Manion (the aforementioned Lee Remick). But what really happened? And (more importantly) can Jimmy Stewart play enough legal angles to generate reasonable doubt about the sanity of the perpetrator?

Jimmy and his co-workers are the only remotely likeable characters in this movie, and I found myself rooting for him. Lee Remick does a remarkable transformation, as she's introduced as an obvious drunken slut, de-floozied for the trial, popping back again into her normal promiscuous mode at the end. (She was outrageously overlooked by the Oscars, but got a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.) There are a lot of other great actors here, including George C. Scott, Eve Arden, Arthur O'Connell, and Orson Bean.

Random notes:

• Even though Lee Remick was snubbed, the movie still got 7 Oscar nominations.

• Jimmy Stewart's character smokes those repulsive Italian cigars later made even more famous by Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti westerns.

• According to the IMDB, the movie was actually filmed in and around scenic Ishpeming and Marquette, apparently during the approximately three-week window of decent weather they get each year. My guess is that the cigars were necessary to dissuade the mosquitoes.

• The DVD has the movie's original trailer, which is pretty good, with director Otto Preminger hamming it up with "Robert Traver" (the pseudonym of Michigan State Supreme Court judge John D. Voelker), who wrote the source novel.

• The movie was pretty racy for 1959; it even was banned in Chicago. There's nothing that, nowadays, couldn't appear in your average gritty prime-time TV crime drama. This ages the movie: some things are meant to "shock" the audience, but go right over the heads of modern viewers.

• Whoa, Duke Ellington has a cameo, playing the piano with Jimmy Stewart. He did the (Grammy-winning) soundtrack.

• A non-cameo role, that of the trial judge, is played by Joseph N. Welch, famous in real life for the "Have you no sense of decency" shootdown of Senator McCarthy in 1954. He's good, also getting a Golden Globe nomination.

• I was persuaded to put the movie in my Netflix queue by Kurt Schlichter's recent appreciation at Big Hollywood. If you're not convinced by me, he might do the trick.