The courtroom drama is a genre that has never gone out of fashion. So long as there have been opposing viewpoints, people have been drawn into these stories. It could be that at its core is a literal push between opposing forces. It’s our quest for the world to have this staunch form of justice, where evil always loses. However, anyone who has so much as paid attention to the news, a courtroom drama becomes more exciting the dirtier it is, the more that it has opposing forces all pleading for their moment. There’s deceit, shocking twists, and finds us stuck in a state of contradiction. We want justice but, as the Netflix series Tiger King recently showed us, we’re drawn into the vulgar because we can’t believe how depraved humanity can be. We’re leering into these crimes and feeling better about ourselves because we’re too scared to be criminals, or at least not stand before a trial of our peers and be branded a criminal.
That is why the genre hasn’t gone away and throughout the century of film, many takes have come and gone. While there’s few like John Grisham who makes it into an art form, most of the masterpieces come with this deeper social commentary. There’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) that finds the future president forming his moral code. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) explores race relations in the south. 12 Angry Men (1957) focuses on how jurors can see the same case differently. Meanwhile, later films like …And Justice for All (1979), The Verdict (1982), A Few Good Men (1992) finds sympathetic yet deranged looks into how lawyers try to maintain their sanity when the world’s against them. Of course, there’s many more, but those are the titles deemed masterpieces by public opinion.
I personally consider The Verdict to be the best courtroom drama, though it’s in large part because I recognize Paul Newman’s frustration. I once had to serve jury duty on a straightforward D.U.I. case. The man even confessed to having a few drinks, but the case went to a mistrial because half of the jury got caught up not in if he was drunk, but if he was drunk enough. Any doubt came from people criticizing witnesses who were law enforcement officers who hadn’t had to deal with the situation for at least seven months. I knew very well that memory is a malleable force, but it remained a point of the divide. I saw how manipulative each side was and becoming disappointed that what seemed clear to me wasn’t to other people. X and Y equaled Z, but people got involved with nonexistent exponents. Like Newman, who was so convinced of his truth, I felt defeated when the answer was, in laymen’s terms, wrong.
I’ve tried to not let it inform my thoughts on the legal system, though the feeling of sitting through jury duty again feels terrible. It isn’t just the sense of spending a week watching a guy find excuses for not just paying his D.U.I. fine, it’s that the whole process is tedious. It almost impairs you to go with the simple answer because, by the time it starts, you’re days into being in a courtroom watching everybody be cross-examined just to find a “perfect” jury. If anything, it makes me sympathize with the whole process and I give credit to people who have that kind of patience. I think I screwed myself over when I accidentally wiggled in my seat from discomfort and had the prosecutor (who looked like James Belushi in Show Me a Hero) think that I was eager to get the trial going.
That’s what has made watching every courtroom drama since far more engaging. It isn’t just a chance to see some of cinema’s greatest actors tear into brilliant writing. It’s the feeling of being back there, in a moment of optimism that justice will prevail once again. You consume the evidence and become intrigued by every small twist. You’re that 13th juror, making heads and tails of a situation. It’s why I loved …And Justice for All, which made the day-to-day of a defense attorney seem just as frustrating as I think it is.
Then there’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), which has been considered one of the most accurate depictions of a courtroom case ever committed to film. There’s a lot going against wanting to watch it, notably the fact that it’s borderline three hours long. I also keep thinking that it’s an Alfred Hitchcock movie because of how much the poster looks like it was made by Saul Bass. But hey, It’s James Stewart and that can never go wrong. He’s always been good in a courtroom. Remember Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)? Yeah, that guy can monologue with the best of them.
Considering that I had a ton of laundry to do that night, I popped the film on The Criterion Channel and finally watched. If I knew anything about the director, Otto Preminger, it’s that he had a bold personality. It felt like I was always watching Classic Hollywood interviews and without fail most of them would be like “… and that’s when Otto Preminger showed up.” What was it about this man that made him stand out? It couldn’t just be that he was one of the O.G. Mr. Freezes. He had to have done something magnificent with his career to make him stand out.
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The fact that Anatomy of a Murder is a masterpiece of the courtroom drama is owed a lot to his legacy. His love of tackling things like drug addiction, homosexuality, and race relations made him a bold figure but one who has resonated because of how he approached it. Whereas you watch early John Waters and Female Trouble (1974) feels gross, Preminger always had an air of class to his work, elevating the dirt to a melodramatic art form. His characters were informed by these actions and in some ways grappled with their moral core. It wasn’t just shock value. It was sympathizing with the deviance in all of us in order to better understand it.
That is nowhere truer than in the language of his 1959 film. Before we get to the heart of the film, it does feel like this needs to be your fourth or fifth Stewart movie. You can’t start here because otherwise, the performance doesn’t work. As the do-gooder who could be described as America’s Dad, it is shocking to hear him use words like rape, panties, sperm, and contraception. The actions are described with a certain vividness that acts of abuse become disturbing. While films like The Verdict have desensitized the shock of these older films, it’s to Preminger’s credit that it’s not the words themselves that will make you gasp, but the context around them.
The judge (Joseph N. Welch) at one point addresses the court, saying that since panties is a normal word and that all women refer to their undergarments as such, they will be using the word in the case. This moment is to allow the courtroom to snicker at the funny word before moving ahead into the dark and serious reality that the panties represent. It’s a moment that breaks the fourth wall, as Preminger feels like he’s directly addressing the audience that these words may sound appalling, but they hold a deeper meaning in the story and to trivialize them with “undergarments” does a great disservice. With that said, panties is said a lot in the film and it feels like Preminger breaking a barrier. He’s contextualizing these words in a way that pushes boundaries but still has a deeper meaning. Not only that, but Welch was the judge who once famously said to Joseph McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency?" adding another layer of commentary to the story.
Then there’s the case itself. While the film is almost three hours, there is something to watching Stewart prepare for the trial. The score is done by jazz legend Duke Ellington, who even makes a cameo in the film as Pie-Eye. If you want to know how confident Preminger is in his execution, try and make it through the opening credits as images of shapes take the form of a corpse. As it does, Ellington’s playing these sultry horns. They feel melancholic and erotic in equal measure, making you find the distinguished line that this film will cover. It’s a story that centers around rape and murder, and the quest for Preminger to play into society’s fascination with other people’s dirty laundry (no pun intended) only makes the professionalism of its context all the more powerful.
It may be his most literal deconstruction of humanity’s perversity, and all within the guise of a prestige drama. We get to see the battered wife, people landing in the hospital likely to just escape trial, and a story so twisted that its milquetoast setting can’t tear us away. It never feels safe. Even as the trial’s length becomes interminable, Preminger’s finding ways to play with our perception. How do you keep the case exciting? Well, you have the defense attorney and prosecution constantly nipping at each other. The framing always pits the other in the near distance, like a demon on their shoulder, or a buffer between a witness. These figures are at each other’s throats (sometimes literally), and you get the sense that one false step can undo the meticulousness that Preminger has laid out.
If there’s one breakout star of the film, it’s George C. Scott as prosecutor Claude Dancer. As someone who would evolve to play a hard-ass in films like Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Patton (1970), he feels subdued here, as if he’s waiting to pounce on Stewart’s defense attorney Paul Biegler. We don’t get a lot of time with Dancer outside of the court, and it makes his attacks all the more surprising, more vicious as he finds clever angles to convince the public that the murder trial isn’t what we think it is. While we know Scott for everything since, him being this young and hungry actor coming for Stewart’s throne really plays well in our subconscious. Who is this outsider coming for the icon? You want to hate him immediately, even though he’s giving arguably the greatest performance in the film just because of how his jabs are punctuations on our expectations of Biegler’s arc. It tells us that this won’t happen without a battle of words.
In the case of stories like this, it’s almost not important how things play out. You’re just so wrapped up in a mix of keeping the details straight, the performances, and Preminger’s obsession with making taboo subjects into high art. The final verdict of “not guilty by reasons of insanity” is the only right answer (even though I have my own thoughts on that idea) because this whole thing is crazy. You can’t believe that anyone would do this in the first place. Then again, that’s what a provocateur does. He makes you see the disturbing side of humanity in a different lens, and he does so in a way that diffuses terms of their juvenile euphemisms. He’s made a courtroom drama where dirty ideas are given a serious context and eventually the images have real-world contexts that make you understand the weight of this. There’s no mincing. Preminger goes for the jugular and comes out with a riveting epic about justice.
Is it my favorite courtroom drama? No. There’s a lot of moments that feel slow and take too long to get to the point. However, so much of the tone of the film is breathtaking and fresh, even 60 years later. The writing is used far more effectively than I would’ve thought. This has everything that a great adult drama should have. More than anything, it makes me want to watch more George C. Scott movies because I honestly have rarely seen him this good. He gets under your skin and stays there. If there’s anything that’s disappointing, it’s that this lost Best Picture at the Oscars to Ben-Hur (1959).
I don’t love that epic and feel that its impact has aged poorly. Meanwhile, Anatomy of a Murder feels like it set a high bar for where the courtroom drama would go over the next 40 years. I see so much of it in newer films, and I imagine there’s more to those who obsess over courtroom activities. To me, it’s a great evolution of where taboo cinema can go. It makes us see the world as someplace richer for its existence. I guess it was too controversial for the time, and I totally get that. Even then, Ben-Hur was one of the last towering giants of a bygone way of filmmaking. Anatomy of a Murder was the complete opposite.
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