After the modernist assault of Saul Bass’ title credits, which abstract and sever a minimalist outline of a human body like an anatomical puppet or an animator’s specimen, backed by Duke Ellington’s bracing, off-kilter jazz score, Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder throws us a sly curveball. Preminger drops us into a noirish, endless sequence of shots of a car driving through the middle-of-nowhere, slithering on the path to ill intent, seemingly backing up the credit sequence’s promise of nefarious activity underfoot. Except when the driver gets out, it’s Jimmy Stewart, and he’s just been enjoying a leisurely afternoon fishing. And then when Stewart wanders into his unassuming house, a flick of the light switch suddenly reveals a studious, forbidding wall of mighty legal tomes. We get the sense less that we’ve moved from one world to another than that the mise-en-scène has folded multiple layers of existence into one another, layering a chiaroscuro noir on top of a lazy-day comedy on top of a legal drama. This is a man as inviting, and as pungent, and as confusing as an onion, and this will become a film that is interested in casually, continuously peeling, scraping, away at society’s facades rather than giving the audience the satisfaction of a carefully resolved mystery or rushing toward something as superficial as a “guilty” or “innocent” verdict.

Anatomy of a Murder takes its time here and throughout. It never insists on anything, offering a leisurely, observational sidewind through a densely knotted tangle of a crime the film is more invested in walking around and peering at than really untangling. The closest analogue I can think of is Howard Hawks’ loquacious Rio Bravo from the same year, a film that turned the promise of a strenuous, sinewy siege-Western into a loose, go-nowhere hangout picture. Just as surely as that film was a kind of response to the tight-and-trim High Noon (also great), Anatomy of a Murder feels like the anti-12 Angry Men, staging not a masculine juror’s thrust toward the achievement of legal doubt enshrined as a personal moral victory but a complex, latitudinal portrait of loose community layered with decades of history. Certainly, Anatomy has a much nastier bite than Hawks’ laconic oater, but they share an ethos of investment more in the minuscule gestures that define mutual relation than the brutal efficiency of forward movement. While 12 Angry Men can never quite escape the sense that it is moving us to a position we are already, inevitably, primed to support, Anatomy splays out. All while seemingly wasting time with the minutiae of every detail, it secretly, invisibly stabs so many knives into human morality that we can only walk away with our sense of truth having been quietly, almost invisibly pulled out from under us, our hope for what constitutes proper justice melted into a swampy morass of questions and conundrums.

Although that may not be what we first think when young wife Laura Manion (Lee Remick) attempts to hire out-of-work attorney Paul Biegler (Stewart) to represent her imprisoned husband Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), who has been arrested for the murder of innkeeper Barney Quill for, Laura claims, violently raping her. Yet Biegler, much against the cinema lawyer’s code, is initially hesitant with taking the case, suggesting that it piques his curiosity but not his fascination. After the film is good and ready, he conscripts an old friend Parnell McCarthy (Arthur O’Connell), who has fallen to the drink, to assist along with his secretary Maida Rutledge (Eve Arden). The local prosecutor Mitch Lodwick (Brooks West), for his part, calls forth the young Detroit-based prosecutor Claude Dancer (George C. Scott), who marshals his prodigious intellect while Biegler mobilizes his colloquial know-how in courting the testimonial of Mary Pilant (Kathryn Grant), who works at Quill’s inn but seems to know more than she lets on.

That’s a mouthful, but what the film is really up to can’t be captured in the plot description, nor lessened to a jury’s eventual 11^th hour sentencing. The title credits come back around as the film anatomizes not only the dead man and Frederick Manion but the mind and body of Laura Manion, who is alternately self-possessed and vulnerable, deeply concerned and seemingly disinvested in her husband’s fate. As it sifts through what one character calls the “natural impurities of the law,” it also interrogates Biegler, who never seems especially morally invested in the case. When he inquires into Manion’s personal habits and the whereabouts of her clothing on the night of the incident and remarks “sorry if I offended you,” she casually responds “no, you’re not,” and we aren’t meant to be surprised in the least.

The community itself doesn’t emerge unscathed either, with Wendell Mayes’s screenplay making sure to unofficially peruse nearly every character in the film, even when no one involved in the trial is officially interrogating them. Thus, we get a judge who occasionally seems a bit too interested in the fishing hooks Biegler makes and who readies the room for a violent murder trial the same way he introduces a harmless misdemeanor case of breaking and entering to steal and drink a bottle of whiskey. Later, two lawyers discuss the finer points of insanity defenses while one burps out strawberry soda. A police interrogation room has a list of driver’s license rules and a seeing eye test on the wall for those who bother to notice, the stretch marks of a well-worn building unused to having to interrogate crimes like these. The background detritus of a simultaneously over and underused space is also the weathered visage of home. By the end, Preminger has conjured a town in which everyone seems to be friends, and in which friendship doesn’t seem to mean too much, except perhaps the companionship of two elderly partners for whom the law is less a personal passion than a commitment to a principle of good living.

By the time we do get to the actual courtroom, nearly half the film has simultaneously skulked and fled by, and Anatomy has already figured the judicial system as a proscenium of the mind where the “attorneys will provide the wisecracks.” Preminger explicitly understands the courtroom as a theatrical battleground of suggestions and sensations, mischievous cuts and unexpected threads of connection. While he isn’t typically understood as a visual master to mettle in Hitchcock’s territory, Preminger exhibits a quiet command of the constantly shifting lines of dissent. In a phenomenal moment where Dancer is in the foreground questioning a witness, and Biegler is behind him struggling to see as his view is blocked, we are meant to understand that he is also fighting to be seen by the camera. Suddenly, Biegler’s habit of working on various feathery fish hooks as he listens to his opponent’s arguments seems somewhat less like a personal quirk or a mark of cheerful insouciance or presumptuous indiscretion and more like a tactic of homespun subterfuge, a desire to convey both disinterested incompetence and self-conscious superiority depending on who is looking. (Stewart, fresh off his obsessive performance in Vertigo, is, comparatively, masterfully noncommittal here, playing the country lawyer type as a serious but self-amused sort who generally sits slightly above the fray around him.)

Yet the film’s signature image, for me, isn’t of two men battling for visibility but of sharing a space, both in mutual support of each other and in mutual refusal to acknowledge the vaster array of wider contests and changes that sit behind them in the same frame. In a two-shot of Biegler and Parnell quietly eating lunch at a diner counter, Stewart diligently but unhurriedly peels a hard-boiled egg’s shell, all the while a whole colony of industrial equipment builds a truly gigantic façade behind them. I can’t say whether this was a serendipitous find of the location shooting in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or just a phenomenal effort for a background image that is never explained in the film. Regardless, Preminger’s gift for silently multilayered images beautifully folds many variations of process into one another, from the unfathomable machinery of modernization, to Biegler’s dogged but uncommented desire to un-peel the egg, to the quiet insistence that this is all really about getting his friend back into the fold without letting on as much. The shot encapsulates the knotty, slippery texture of the film – which is also Biegler’s métier as a lawyer and a human – focused but disarmingly casual, suggestive but never ostentatious, deeply aware of the world but also withdrawn from it. The massive labyrinth of girders behind them weaves a web as entangled and threatening as the case itself, and the two men in the frame sit at once pressed up against it and at an imposed distance. Without ever once engaging in histrionics or raising its voice to us, we feel that the film is hoping we don’t drown in an abyssal muddle even while it is perilously edging us ever, ever closer to it.  

Score: 10/10