A Film Canon

If 12 Angry Men insists upon the jury as subjects, then Anatomy Of A Murder insists upon them as objects, or at least spectators, translating Capra's democratic conversation-space into an observation-space, from which a "direct, simple action" and an "irresistible impulse" have to be reclaimed and contained. To this end, Preminger presents the courtroom as a spectral, echoed version of the events that it describes, resulting in an unprecedented elaboration - and eroticisation - of the relationship between attorneys, witnesses and suspects, as well as a diffusion of charisma into the most mundane, pedantic or ancillary elements of the procedural itself, conveniently bolstered by a "quaint liberalist" small-town backdrop. It also produces an unusual deflection of the parameters of the case, from the question of whether Frederic Manion (Ben Gazzara) killed Barney Quill in a state of temporary insanity, to whether Quill raped his wife (Lee Remick), as if Lee Biegler's (James Stewart) defence were required, by convention, to include a romantic or sexual angle, or at least to justify Manion's actions as those of a particular kind of spectator. In the process, Preminger identifies the 'twist' as compensating for a "dissociative reaction" increasingly endemic to cinema itself; an attempt to recover the slackening power of narrative, or at least imbue its increasing formalism with the visceral imperatives of Duke Ellington's score.