OVP: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Film: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Stars: James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Arthur O'Connell, Eve Arden, Kathryn Grant, George C. Scott, Joseph N. Welch
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-James Stewart, Supporting Actor-George C. Scott, Supporting Actor-Arthur O'Connell, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

All right, we are on Day 2 of our week devoted to Best Supporting Actor.  One of my favorite things about doing reviews this way (where there's a common Oscar theme, but generally the films have little else in common, hopefully proving both the depth of each category within the Academy and forcing me to have a little bit more structure to knocking out some more great movies) is that when a movie gets a lot of nominations, you don't necessarily think of it first as a nominee in a category like Best Supporting Actor.  This is especially true for Anatomy of a Murder.  If you think of this movie today, it's obviously going to be as a "classic courtroom drama" one of the harbingers of eventual hit television series like The Defenders.  If you think of it in relation to Oscar, it's almost certainly going to be for its Best Picture nomination (weirdly the split in 1959 that meant Otto Preminger wasn't nominated was that Billy Wilder was for Some Like It Hot) or for being Jimmy Stewart's final nomination for Best Actor, which he lost to Charlton Heston during the Ben-Hur sweep.  However, Anatomy of a Murder is the only film we're going to profile this week that received two nominations for Best Supporting Actor, one for steady character actor Arthur O'Connell and the first nomination for a man who would one day turn down the Oscar: George C. Scott.

(Spoilers Ahead) Anatomy of a Murder has a lot of characters, but I'll attempt to summarize here.  At the center of the story is Paul Biegler (Stewart), a down-on-his-luck lawyer who recently lost his race for district attorney, and as a result is cash-strapped, unable to pay his secretary Madge (Arden) as he spends most of his time with his drinking buddy Parnell (O'Connell).  A case lands in his lap of a man  named Frederick Manion (Gazzara), a war veteran accused of murdering the man who raped his wife Laura (Remick).  Biegler tries the case on temporary insanity, as unlike a lot of dramas we would have seen at the time (where the defendant would be truly not guilty), there's never any question that Manion killed the man who raped his wife.  The film's central storyline largely unfolds in the courtroom, with Stewart and the prosecuting attorney Claude Dancer (Scott) going against each other in a series of rapid fire questioning rounds with witness after witness, until finally it's Mary Pilant (Grant, in one of the only roles she'd do after her marriage to Bing Crosby) provides enough evidence to the fact that her father raped Laura that they dismiss the charges against her husband.

There are a lot of things to unpack with a movie like Anatomy of a Murder, which at nearly three hours long (though it never feels like that, and indeed I was having so much fun I would have happily gone on for another hour) has a lot of plot.  The film at the time was landmark.  It was banned for a period in Chicago because it spoke so frankly about sex (this is the earliest chronologically I've ever seen a film use the word "sperm," for example), and is not shy about the realities of what happened to Laura Manion.  It's particularly interesting because of the way that Laura Manion is depicted in the film.  In Classic Hollywood, rape victims were almost always played as virginal saints (think of Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda or Hope Lange in Peyton Place)-Laura Manion is not a virgin (she's been married twice) and is not shy about clearly liking sex & liking that men are attracted to her.  That the film manages to show a woman of her proclivity as being a rape victim (that it shouldn't matter what a woman looks like, "no means no means no" is always right) is really progressive, and something I wasn't expecting going into this picture.

This boldness really hits well with the film though-this is a movie that cares about detail, cares about telling a complicated story.  We leave not really knowing if Fred Manion is guilty or not, or whether Stewart's Biegler (who gave him the idea of temporary insanity in what bordered on witness tampering) simply let a guilty man off by trying a different case (essentially stating that the man he killed wasn't worth a war veteran going to jail).  We also don't have a sense that the Manions live happily ever after-the ending heavily implies that Laura & Fred had a violent squabble, and that they are headed into another town to start over, but with the same character defects they had here.  It is only Biegler who has learned from this that he can move on past his election loss, and start helping he, Madge, and Parnell continue to make a living going forward.  It's the sort of open-ended finale you'd struggle to find even in modern day movies, and the ease with which it happens is enviable.

The Oscar nominations were uniformly strong-lots of strong competition when we eventually get to this year in the OVP, but know that Anatomy is coming with a winning hand.  Stewart is charming, but finds a rascal in his Paul that is fantastic, and proof that his career-best work in Vertigo the year before was no fluke-he was on a role.  The Cinematography is splendid, as is the editing, with the moving camera of the courtroom scenes working overtime to give us looks at being, in turn, the witnesses, the jury, the judge, and the lawyers.  I loved the screenplay too-it's hard to pull off a legal thriller and have people curious what will happen in the end, but they did just that, and the care that they handled the sensitive nature of the movie (but didn't handle it with kid gloves) is brilliant.

And as for our Supporting Actors?  Honestly, it's hard to tell which one's better.  Scott gets the showier role-the first hour or so you're going to wonder how he was nominated, but once you get into the film, you see his power and gravitas, particularly in his cross-examination of Lee Remick's Laura (Remick, who was cited by the Globes, had to have just missed with Oscar and it's disappointing she wasn't cited even in a strong field, as she's sensational & maybe the best performance in the movie, give or take Stewart), and suddenly you're wondering how he didn't win the Oscar, as this is the sort of performance that wins.  O'Connell's isn't the type that wins, but it's wonderful to watch his chemistry with Stewart, and the laid-back approach of his character.  There's layers in his work as it unfolds.  He's a drunk who was perhaps saved from being a lost cause by his friendship with Biegler, and the potential he saw in him, though O'Connell never gets the "I'll give up the booze!" sort of scene that would normally be required of an actor playing an alcoholic to get nominated.  Oscar wisely picked these two men as his nominees rather than the Globe-cited Joseph Welch, who portrays the judge.  Welch would have been an understandable if gimmicky choice that Oscar might have eaten up-he had been Chief Counsel for the Army during the McCarthy hearings, and was seen as the most important figure in taking down Sen. McCarthy (whose crusade, of course, had destroyed the careers of dozens of Hollywood figures).  This was his only role, and one he took on a lark-he's fine, if not particularly impressive in a plum role, and I'm glad if they were only going to give two citations to Anatomy, they went with O'Connell & Scott.