Anatomy, Indeed

Time for some more backlogging.

Preminger has always seemed such an oddball in American cinema. It's quite

remarkable to me that he got a gig as an American filmmaker in the time that he was working. Sure, film noir was an established and popular genre at the time, but he took his own tack through the brooding, often mechanical pedigree of cinema.

Anatomy of a Murder is rightly considered a classic. The ticking, ever forward momentum of the film is one of the prime examples of pacing from the period. It is more accomplished than any film I can remember at depicting a profession with all of its idiosyncrasies and small details and incorporating them into integral parts of the plot. This is one of the things that cinema does best: finding the pertinent, sometimes infinitesimal details and exploiting them, something that even a form like literature (which is my other passion) has a much harder time accomplishing. Preminger knew this perhaps better than any other American filmmaker in his time.

I can't get away with talking about the film and not mentioning 2 other major assets: the exquisite casting and how it somehow passed the censors given the subject matter. Jimmy Stewart controls the film with his usual degree of virtuosity, but I must give credit to the late Ben Gazzara in an early role. He saw

something in his role that many other actors would never have seen, and it turned out to be an insightful look into the heart of young, brash men of the time, whose ends justified every means. Lee Remick was tasked with navigating her character down the very narrow path of being highly sexually suggestive and somehow keeping enough back to avoid censorship. How this film skated by

a censorship board I can only guess. Perhaps the film was simply too engaging to keep from the public or too instructive about the process of the American court system.

But what this film does best is understand the power of its script and the specific word selection within. When the judge and lawyers discuss the connotation of the word "panties" and try to find a more palatable alterative, the film shows a bit of its hand. This becomes particularly important in the field of law when word choice can make or break a case. Stewart and Joseph Welch handle this particularity with aplomb while not landing on it with so much force as to crush the viewer.

All this is highlighted by the pace-reinforcing score by Duke Ellington and Saul Bass intro (which is not one of my favorites from his oeuvre but is still of note, nonetheless). One could blame films like this for the ubiquity of modern television crime dramas, and perhaps one would be partially correct to, but it would be blind not to see how it is far more incisive and probing, that there was much more craft involved in its bit-by-bit construction, pointing at something beyond what the eye can discern.