That old "irresistible impulse"

The protagonist of Anatomy of a Murder (1959) is a Michigan attorney who reveres his trade yet seems far more concerned with fishing; he’s a self-described “country lawyer” who loves, and plays, jazz; he’s an aging bachelor who retains certain seductive qualities yet spends all his time with an amiable yet fashion-impaired drunk. When he goes to trial, defending a killer and Korean War vet whom he’s nudged ever so lightly into pleading insanity, he flies into tantrums that can be awfully hard to distinguish from calculated performance. Paul Biegler is charismatic, riddled with seeming contradictions, and even after two-and-a-half hours the central figure of this film remains chillingly opaque. The most brilliant move in the construction of Biegler is the casting of James Stewart, once a paragon of earnest virtue, who by this point in his career was suddenly turning his persona inside out (see Vertigo, released the year previously, for another prime example), so that, as historian Foster Hirsch puts it in one of the supplements on Criterion’s new release, he made you rethink all those previous beloved Jimmy Stewart roles—were they too not simply performances?

Anatomy of a Murder is a Hollywood masterpiece, the product of Otto Preminger, a great director/producer who build his cred under studio contract before going independent, seizing every aspect of a large-scale production to maximize impact by knowing precisely when to force and issue—he would tolerate no euphemisms in the trial scenes, which led to a lot of panties—and when to hold back and revel in ambiguity. No one in this story is innocent, least of all Biegler’s client, Lieutenant Frederick Manion, played by the late Ben Gazzara with a cold inner fire, and his wife, Laura Manion, played by Lee Remick with a still-astonishing fearlessness. The Manions’ claims that Laura was raped by the man Manion subsequently murdered is the lynchpin in Biegler’s case, yet, as coolly directed by Preminger, whose detached mise en scène consistently avoids emphasis and thus places the onus of judgement on his audience, the film saddles Laura’s already fraught narrative with only more complications as it goes along. She may very well have been raped, though, outside the courtroom, she does just about everything to fulfill the troubling criteria for the proverbial woman who’s “asking for it.” Her unapologetically bold sexuality has certainly prompted a deep freeze in her marriage—the handful of brief, wordless interaction between the Manions are enigmatic to say the least—and Remick does nothing to render Laura more obviously sympathetic or trustworthy.

All this is to say that Anatomy of a Murder is indeed an homage to American law, but perhaps what it celebrates above all is law for law’s sake—not any sort of moral justice. Shot entirely on location, brimming with loving local detail, buoyed by Duke Ellington’s genius, careening, shrewdly used score, framed by Saul Bass’ graphically austere yet subtly violent and unnerving title designs, the film is a chain of persuasions, suggestions, negotiations and “irresistible impulse,” haunted by a fundamental unknowability with regards to fatal actions and motivations—I say “haunted,” but it’s only we viewers who are haunted; no one in the film seems too distraught by the inconsistencies in the Manions’ story. So it’s mystery on a higher level. Utterly entertaining yet perversely withholding of the very facts that would allow us a sense of closure, even as we gaze upon that abandoned shoe dangling tauntingly from a vacant campsite garbage container before the final scattering of squeaks from Cat Anderson’s trumpet hang in the darkness, deliciously unresolved.

Anatomy of a master: Otto Preminger at the Cinematheque Ontario

Like so many of the émigré directors who thrived in postwar Hollywood, the Austrian-born Otto Preminger (1905-1986) crafted a body of work sufficiently diverse and studio-friendly as to quietly slip through the cracks in auteur theory (and right out of Andrew Sarris’ Pantheon). But a close look at the qualities that align his best films, which are substantial in number, reveals a highly individual filmmaker extraordinarily capable of balancing the dictates of classical storytelling and often immaculate craft with a highly nuanced predilection toward the incessant contradictions of his characters—and, maybe even more so, his actors—an artist drawn to subversion yet never satisfied with mere cynicism, with simply "exposing" perversity or injustice. His immersion in his characters’ dilemmas could be so total that lingering ambiguities about their choices seemed inevitable rather than just the product of a smug sophisticate seeking to arbitrarily elevate populist material. Preminger's best films don't look down on Hollywood conventions; they perfect them. 

The Cinematheque Ontario’s nearly complete retrospective, Fallen Angels: The Films of Otto Preminger, starts tomorrow, offering audiences an opportunity to survey the span of the director’s oeuvre, as well as a couple of films—Le Corbeau (43), Blow-up (66)—that helped inform it. It starts, appropriately enough, with Laura (44), the film Preminger himself considered his first worthy of note, a brilliant thriller at once so elegant and deeply tawdry it set the high water mark for Fox noir and, along with Preminger’s nearly as good Whirlpool (50), smoked out the fragility, pathos and sexuality buried beneath Gene Tierney’s wholesome beauty—not to mention contributing to the movies’ general mistrust of cultivated, effeminate and unattractive men. And just as Preminger could help render Tierney corrupt, even ordinary, he could make Joan Crawford touching in her resilience and indecision in Daisy Kenyon (47), a very noirish “woman’s picture” that defied the broader tendencies of such melodramas. It’s these 40s noirs that I was already familiar with, so in gearing up for the Cinematheque’s program I caught up with a trio of Preminger’s 50s films that I’d previously managed to neglect.

River of No Return (54) is Preminger’s sole western, a genre he held no special interest in and delved in solely out of contractual obligation. Set and filmed in Banff and Jasper and featuring gorgeous landscapes—courtesy of Joseph LaShelle—it’s somewhat marred by an unavoidable dependence on rear projection during the protagonists’ tumultuous journeys over the titular rushing rapids, as well as woefully generic Indians assigned to the tired role of faceless background menace. Yet overwhelming these less appealing elements are surprisingly resonant stories of yearning, independence and brutal maturation. Matt Calder (Robert Mitchum) reunites with the nine-year-old son who never knew him and tries to start a new life as a farmer with a shady past. Kay Weston (Marilyn Monroe) is a showgirl tired of performing for camps of drunks who tries to start a new life with a gambler who’s sure he’s struck gold. How their paths become tangled is at certain points excessively artificial, but how these characters connect—through their sensitivity to the boy, through sheer desperation to survive, through the lovely performances from both leads—feels genuine and multiplies the story’s adventures to include the building of an accidental family.

Mitchum, busted for pot possession during the shoot, initially seems to be at his most mystically unshakable here—even when his house is being burned down he seems nonplussed. But the shifts in his temperament when dealing with his son and grappling with his violent past spurs him into riveting engagement. Monroe, who like many less confident actors suffered under the notoriously merciless and mercurial Preminger, exudes preternatural world-weariness here, a tough but warm woman all-too cognizant of her abundant sex appeal and seeking, if not entirely expecting to actually find, some sort of security. The scene where Mitchum sexually assaults her—only to be assaulted in turn by a mountain lion—speaks volumes about Hollywood’s sense of entitlement with their starlets. But the finale, which neatly closes a circle of retribution, is devastating in its way.

Bonjour Tristesse (58), which brought new texture to its Françoise Sagan source novel, is far more difficult to classify and more rewarding in its murky and audaciously unresolved emotional undercurrents. Any wonder it bombed? Chronicling the failed attempt at marriage by Raymond (David Niven), the aging Don Juan/bon vivant/permissive poppa of young Cécile (Preminger discovery Jean Seberg), the film renders the past “an invisible wall of memories,” something both tainted by tragedy and nostalgically hued—the flashbacks are in colour, the present-tense framing device in black and white. A coming-of-age story about the inability to come-of-age, it paints a portrait of father-daughter love that may or may not read as incestuous but most certainly conveys a morbid codependence that allows the elder participant to remain ostensibly youthful at the expense of the younger one, whose need for her father’s exclusive love is so strong that it sabotages the very change, embodied by love-struck clothing designer Anne (Deborah Kerr), both require to move on with their drifting, responsibility-free lives.

Derided in its time—despite her adorability in her hot water bottle beret—Seberg’s performance has aged amazingly well. Her childlike blankness at certain key points fits perfectly with Cécile’s increasingly internalized despair, weirdly emphasized by the echo of her voice-over, which sounds like it was recorded in somebody's windowless bathroom. Admittedly, there’s something really odd about having a French father and daughter played by a Brit and an American, but what counts, as in River, is how they connect with each other and unconsciously conspire to keep the rest of the world out of their arrangement. Preminger continually nurtures their intimacy through subtly indicative framing, and Raymond and Cécile’s stasis is nicely offset by the relative mobility of Elsa (Mylène Demongeot), Raymond’s bubbly blonde plaything who pours an awful lot of fun into this ultimately depressing tale while, à la Monroe in River, proves that seemingly less substantial characters can be complex and dynamic, too.

If I didn’t know what to expect from the above films, Anatomy of a Murder (59) was a film where my expectations were simply blown apart. I’d always meant to see it, mainly for Duke Ellington’s score and to catch a young Ben Gazzara in action, but was only mildly interested in what promised to be a solid courtroom drama. But, far more than, say, 12 Angry Men (57), the film probed the peripheries of due process to a place where truth and justice are blurred into an impenetrable haze. Fresh from drowning his familiar persona of decency in an abyss of necrophiliac obsession as Scotty in Vertigo (58), James Stewart plays rural Michigan lawyer Paul Biegler, like Scotty, a reclusive bachelor recently humbled by occupational failure. With his old alcoholic pal (Arthur O’Connell) as his legal assistant, Paul takes a seemingly hopeless case defending a moody-as-all-hell Korean War vet (Gazzara) who murdered a barkeep he says raped his flamboyantly flirtatious wife (Lee Remick).

Nothing in the performances, Wendell Mayes’ script or Preminger’s direction, ever does anything to convince Paul or us of Gazzara’s nobility or his claims of succumbing to “uncontrollable impulse,” but the smaller truths Paul collects along the way to a verdict, along with our collective agreement to talk at leisure about Remick’s soiled panties, bring us closer to feeling like we’re getting somewhere meaningful, even if the ending assures us Paul’s efforts were finally morally meaningless. Preminger is remarkably relaxed in his pacing and camerawork, again focusing on development of place and character, allowing us to sit back with Paul as he plays the piano with Duke (!) or eats hard-boiled eggs. The pay-off is enormous, a completely absorbing entertainment—replete with superb supporting work from George C. Scott and a dog that can operate a flashlight—and a troubling essay on how deceptively shrewd lawyers and great movie stars can pretty much talk us into anything.