JWBly Review of Anatomy of a Murder

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Well acted film noir that ultimately goes nowhere

[4/10 · 10 December 2005]

I watched this film for the first time yesterday. To be honest, I had never even heard of it before, despite being a big Jimmy Stewart fan. After watching for the first hour and a half, I was still wondering where this movie had been all my life. James Stewart gives a wonderful performance as a brilliant small-town lawyer, a cross between Perry Mason and Ben Matlock. The courtroom duels between Stewart and prosecutor George C. Scott are wonderful. A very young Lee Remick is excellent as the sex-starved tramp of a wife to Ben Gazzara - a precursor to today's Desperate Housewives perhaps? In addition, the film is directed by the legendary Otto Preminger, best known to those of my generation as Mr. Freeze on the old BATMAN show. So why isn't this film better known? The answer is simple - the ending is terrible. You keep waiting and waiting for all the loose ends, all the characters, all the drama to be wrapped up in one slam-bang finale, a la WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. Sadly, none of this occurs. This film left me feeling empty and cheated. I guess it is never a waste of time to spend almost 3 hours watching Jimmy Stewart at his mid-career best, but this was a one-shot deal for me. I won't watch it again and do not recommend it - unless you turn it off right before the end and just imagine what COULD have happened.