A stange conjuncion of old and new: Anatomy of a Murder

Otto Preminger's 1959 Anatomy of a Murder, is a classic of the genre and the forefather of dozens of other courtroom drama - but somehow none have the earnestness, the flair, and the sense of American hegemony - postwar America, when we thought the world was ours and that prosperity would be never-ending and that all was right with American democracy and social justice - as the 50s melodramas. This movie, very long and very earnest, even for its day, is a tautly plotted movie, based I would guess very closely on a novel, with some really strong actors - James Stewart, lee Remick, Ben Gazzzara, and a young George C. Scott - in the lead roles. Very briefly, Steward is a down-on-his-luck country attorney (the Michigan Upper Peninsula - a very cool and unusual setting for a Hollywood movie, and I suspect Preminger may have shot it on location - can you imagine that today? Not shooting on the location of the lowest taxes?); Gazzara is an Army lieutenant who, in a rage, kills the man - a local roadhouse owner - who allegedly raped his wife, a very sultry Remick. If this will surprise you stop reading here - but of course Steward gets Gazzara off, building a case that he killed in blind rage and didn't know what he was doing, so he's innocent of Murder 1. Well, I don't know about the niceties of the law but I would suspect the admitted killer would not have walked off free - and though the rapist was no doubt a horrible man, I feel a little disturbed by the movie's unflinching endorsement - the innocent verdict leads to riotous courtroom celebration - of a guy taking the law into his own hands - a precursor, again, of many right-wing movies of the 60s and 70s. That said, Preminger paces the movie really well and engages us in thinking through the plot in (almost) every scene, as least up to the supposedly feel-good ending. One of the extreme pleasures of the movie of course is a fabulous score by Duke Ellington - as cool as if JS Bach had scored one of Shakespeare's plays - and Ellington even appears (as a band leader named Pie Eye) and gets to say a few lines. The movie was extremely provocative in its day - I remember my parents' discussing it - and pretty advanced in its frank discussion of sexuality and violence - a strange conjunction - of old ordder and new - looking back from 55 years - of the avant garde and the last gasp of postwar American pro-military pseudo-patriotism.