Anatomy of a Murder
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Short description
Anatomy of a Murder follows Paul Biegler, a lawyer in a small Michigan town who has drifted into a quiet practice since leaving his post as district attorney. When Laura Manion asks him to defend her husband, an army lieutenant charged with shooting the owner of a local bar, Biegler takes on a case in which the accused has already admitted the killing. The lieutenant says the bar owner had assaulted his wife, and Laura supports his account, though the medical evidence does not clearly back it up. As the trial unfolds, Biegler faces the local district attorney and an experienced prosecutor brought in from out of town, and the proceedings turn on questions about what happened that night and why.
Otto Preminger directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Wendell Mayes. It was the tenth of the sixteen films he directed and came between Bonjour Tristesse in 1958 and Exodus in 1960. James Stewart plays Biegler, with Lee Remick as Laura, Ben Gazzara as Lieutenant Manion, and Arthur O'Connell, Eve Arden and Kathryn Grant among the credited cast of twenty-eight. The film runs 161 minutes and was made for about two million dollars, taking roughly eight million worldwide.
Audience ratings place it highly, at 8 out of 10 on IMDb from nearly seventy thousand votes and 7.8 on TMDB, while critics' reviews average 8.6.
What's left behind the scenes
- The bartender at the establishment where Parnell drinks is named Toivo, and the guard in the prison is named Sulo. Both names are Finnish. The film is set in Michigan, where a large Finnish diaspora was formed and now resides as a result of mass migration from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.
- James Stewart's (1908-1997) father disliked the film so much that he spent money on an advertisement in the local newspaper strongly advising people not to see it.
- The film faithfully and meticulously recreates the 1952 court case handled by lawyer John D. Volcker (1903-1991), who later wrote a novel of the same name under the pseudonym Robert Traver. All the details are preserved: Lieutenant Coleman Peterson shot bartender Maurice Chenoweth, accusing him of raping his beautiful, but often frivolous wife. The lieutenant claimed he was temporarily insane at the time of the murder, and the psychiatrist called it an "irresistible impulse." Peterson’s jury acquitted him, after which he immediately left with his wife, without paying court costs, but leaving a note stating that he was experiencing an "irresistible impulse" to leave.
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