At close to three hours, Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder is – or aspires to be – a work of comprehensive procedural realism, standing in relation to trial protocol as 12 Angry Men does to jury protocol. Ushered in by Saul Bass’ opening credits and a jazzy score composed by Duke Ellington (who also makes an appearance), Wendell Mayes’ screenplay, itself based on the 1958 novel by Robert Traver, is at heart a meditation on the standing of rape accusations within the American public sphere. James Stewart plays Paul Biegler, a lawyer working in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, who is hired to defend Lieutenant Frederick Manion, played by Ben Gazzara, who has been charged with the murder of Thunder Bay bartender Barney Quill. The twist: Manion has admitted to killing Quill but claims that he only did so in a state of temporary insanity after learning that the bartender had raped his wife, Laura Manion, played by Lee Remick. Preminger and Mayes take us seamlessly and scrupulously through the preparation of the case and the procedure of the trial, which turns on a succession of questions – whether Manion was temporarily insane, whether temporary insanity exists, whether Manion believed that Quill raped Laura and, finally, the question that determines the entire trial: whether Laura’s testimony of rape can be fully believed.

In the process, Preminger, one of the great noir directors, charts a shift from a noir lens on masculinity, femininity and marriage to something more emergent (and in some ways more sinister) at mid-century. The first act of the film, which deals with the pre-trial preparation, establishes this noir foundation with some wonderful character building. We open by meeting Stewart’s Biegler, who in Jesus-like fashion is introduced as a fisherman first, and a lawyer second, and who has missed the news of the Manion case after returning home from a fishing trip in a peaceful riparian backwater, far from the turmoil of Thunder Bay. Biegler has never married and has no children – when asked “What do you do alone in this house if you aren’t married?” he replies “Well, it’s a family home. I’m the last of the family.” There’s no Gothic melancholy in thwarted lineages here, however, since Biegler shares his home, which doubles as his workplace, with an eccentric family of his own: his best friend and dipsomaniac colleague Parnell McCarthy, played by Arthur O’Connell, and his spirited secretary Maida Rutledge, played by Eve Arden. During the day he banters with Maida, who reminded me of Barbara Bel Geddes’ Midge in Vertigo, in the evening he reads law with “Parney,” and when alone he immerses himself in his jazz piano – a domestic bliss that turns romantic frustration into a gentle joke: “None but the lonely hearts shall know my anguish.”

In stark contrast to Stewart’s homely Americana, Preminger and Mayes present the world of marriagehood as duplicitous and unreadable – the most suspicious entity in the entire case. More specifically, the institution of marriage is coded in noir terms – Manion’s dishonesty and aggression suggests an unseen matrix of coercive criminality while Laura’s disarming flirtatiousness taps into the most fundamental of femme fatale tropes; namely, that the sheer fact of a rape accusation is in itself synonymous with duplicity. It’s notable that while Biegler is occasionally distracted by Laura’s charms, they’re never long-lasting, and generally played for the same mild humour with which he parodically laments his bachelorhood. The warm American interiority of Biegler’s world is never truly compromised by the proximity of marriagehood; if anything the film ends by cementing Bigerer’s eccentrically chosen family.

Once we get to the trial, however, this distinction between Stewart’s Americana and the world of noir-coded marital relations starts to give way to something a bit different, as Preminger and Mayes treat the courtroom as the venue to expand the Overton Window of discourse around rape (and sexual relations more generally) in American culture. There’s a genius in pairing this with Stewart’s homely Americana – it’s unthinkable that he would have been discussing panties or spermatogenesis in a film made ten years before – and much of the film’s power comes from the dissonance between Stewart as America’s folksy interlocutor and the confrontingly graphic sexual material that he has to litigate. That same dissonance extends to the judge, an eccentric character who also feels like he comes from a courtroom drama from the 1930s (there is a touch of Young Mr. Lincoln about him) but who is in fact played by Joseph Nye Welch, the chief counsel for the United States Army who famously asked Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” A key part of Biegler’s courtroom strategy, then, is playing a part – this is Stewart playing Stewart, an intensified version of his screen persona, suffused with a self-conscious sense of performance, reminding his client that the jury can never strike a part of the performance from their memory, even if the judge instructs them to. Stewart draws especially deeply on his Capraesque self here, since Capra cemented the core of his screen persona like no other director, most notably in a Mr. Smith-esque conceit where he explains the meaning of the case using the analogy of an apple and core, a good, wholesome, old-fashioned metaphor.

Yet this is also where Capra’s Stewart grows up and becomes a creature of mid-century America, in his insistence on rape as something that can and must be openly discussed in the public sphere. Biegler has to fight to bring in the rape accusation as relevant to Manion’s insanity defence and, once the judge permits it, the Overton Window focuses much more specifically on language – specifically, the word “panties.” Indeed, a police officer on the stand refuses to say the word at all, referring only euphemistically to “a certain undergarment,” leading to the judge holding a spontaneous conference in which he expresses his concerns that “panties” has “a light connotation” and asks if there is an alternative term that the lawyers can use. All that prosecution lawyer Claude Dancer, played by George C. Scott, can suggest is a French term that’s “just as bad” and so the judge makes a point of using the term “panties” so that the courtroom audience can expunge their laughter and accept it as proper legal terminology: “There is nothing comic about the word panties when it refers to the death of one man and the possible incarceration of another.”

In this speech, then, we see both the shifts and the contradictions in the film’s imagination of rape. On the one hand, rape is brought into the public sphere, and “legitimised” as an object of forensic scrutiny, and yet this scrutiny further erases the experience of the woman from the equation: the judge doesn’t seem to have any compunction about the fresh wave of humiliation that his “panties” speech brings for Laura Manion, while it’s notable that the seriousness of the case in his eyes hinges upon the death of a man and the possible incarceration of another man, rather than the possible (nay, probable) rape of a woman. From here, then, several parallel rhythms start to emerge in the film, the first of which is an obsessive, almost fetishistic, forensic scrutiny of the panties themselves. Since the case partly turns on the defence’s inability to locate Laura’s panties, when Biegler does finally situate them in a laundry chute in Barney Quill’s hotel, they become the lynchpin of the entire thing, with Biegler proudly offering “this article of clothing as Exhibit 1 for the defence” and Dancer just as quickly questioning the provenance of the panties, by litigating the desires of Mary Pliant, played by Kathryn Grant, the woman who found them at the hotel. Dancer accuses Mary planting the panties as a disgruntled lover, only for Biegler to make his final stunning reveal: that Mary was in fact Biegler’s daughter, the father-daughter relation being the only one in which a woman’s word can apparently be taken at face value.

Yet this obsessive scrutiny of Mary, a relatively minor character, is merely a refraction of the other great rhythm of the film – the remorseless forensic scrutiny of Laura Manion’s body. Granted, false accusations were as possible in the 1950s as they are in the present world, but the film quickly exceeds this practical possibility in its use of a rape-conscious public sphere as the pretext for a new and draconian regulation of the female body. For, no sooner has Biegler established the rape as a legitimate part of the trial than it feels like the jury will buy the question of Manion’s temporary insanity, meaning that the core forensic question is whether the rape in fact happened, and whether this woman’s testimony can be accepted. We certainly see here a noir substrate in which rape testimony is almost inherently linked to the duplicity of the femme fatale, meaning that part of Biegler’s job is to figure out whether this stereotype still holds on the cusp of the 1960s. This produces some of the more lurid and melodramatic images of the film, most notably the crux of Dancer’s cross-examination; namely, the question of why Manion made his wife swear on her rosary to the fact of being raped. Things start to blur a bit now: Biegler is defending the Manions and yet his cutesy Americana is, in the film’s schema, a direct riposte to their trustworthiness, while Manion, as the first prosecutor of his wife, the first person to make her swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is the prototype of Dancer, and oddly aligned with him as well.

This sense that prosecutor, defender and accused are all in some sense aligned against Laura Manion doesn’t exactly dilute or relativise the moral power of Biegler’s defence so much as suffuse the film with a Foucauldian shift from the overt violence and subjugation of the noir universe to a world in which the female body has been turned into a locus of more pervasive and insidious forms of discursive cocercion. In Foucault’s terms, the constant talk of panties (and more generally rape) functions as an incitement to discourse whose ultimate goal is biocontrol and, in that sense, the “anatomy” of the title feels quite literal and quite telling. What this means, in practice, is that noir suspicion is deflected into a barrage of discursion and data that, from the vantage point of the present, often seems ideological rather than “scientific,” most notably a expert witness’ confident assurance that “it’s impossible to tell if a married, sexually mature woman has been raped.” Just as The Birth of a Nation discovers the power of cross-editing in a fable of the Ku Klux Klan, or Gone with the Wind discovers the full sublimity of Technicolor in a paean to the prelapsarian South, Anatomy of a Murder discovers the bedrock of the modern courtroom drama, its fetishistic and delirious fixation on specialist testimony, in the transformation of the female body from an object of noir terror to a mid-century object of discursive coercion. As a result, the middle part of the film is suffused with technical discussions – the question of whether sperm (or the absence of sperm) inside a woman proves anything, the question of whether technicians could have missed the presence of sperm, the question of whether rape consists of “violation” or “completion”; and, from there, the question of what Laura Manion was wearing on the night of the rape, and of how she looked after it (supposedly) happened.

Of course, none of that means that we need to adopt what Sedgwick might describe as a paranoid reading of the film, for its vision of both an expanded discursive field and circumscribed biopolitical drive – and the dissonance of Stewart adrift in the middle of that, trying to reconcile its contradictions – is what makes this such a rich and resonant effort to tap into the structures of feeling of the late 50s. It’s also what makes it such a powerful and compelling courtroom drama, and so fundamental to the genre as it has evolved to the present day. This is Preminger at the top of his game, as confident in his near-three-hour epic scope as William Wyler was with Ben-Hur in the same year, as scene by scene he seems to discover a new language for the courtroom drama, a way to transform it beyond a chamber drama, mere filmed theatre. The opening act, with its peripatetic and investigative rhythm, goes some way to doing this, as does the comic subplot in which Parney makes a side quest to Canada to discover that Mary was Barney’s daughter. But once we get to the courtroom, the main ingredient is Preminger’s extraordinary gift for space, mobile framing and deep focus. Most of the cross-examination involves a roving camera, and the actors themselves roving, so that their reactions, and the reactions of the Manions, are visible to different degrees of depth in the background, beautifully capturing their collective experience of the trial, and placing us artfully in the position of a jury whose job is to read the interpersonal dynamics between them as much as the facticity of the testimony. One of the greatest scenes, the prosecution’s cross-examination of Laura Manion, sees Dancer deliberately positioning himself in front of Laura to obscure her sightline with Biegler, producing a dance of gazes and bodies that Preminger choregraphs beautifully. While Stewart’s performance is clearly front and centre, Preminger draws out incredible work from both Remick and Gazzara too, whose roles involve sitting silently and being on display to the jury for long periods of time, but beneath whose carefully curated courtroom personae we sense deeper ambiguities and ambivalences on the brink of resurfacing.

Interestingly, while there is a certain amount of conventional resolution here – Manion is exonerated, the jury seems to believe Laura’s account – a third trajectory, that has been building subtly around the edge of the film, comes into its own in the closing scenes. This is the jazzy, playful, improvisational strand of the film, which we see in the opening credits, in Ellington’s score, in a scene where Ellington himself and Biegler play together in a nightclub, and in Biegler’s periodic resort to jazz piano to clear his mind, culminating with the night of the jury’s deliberation, when he tinkles abstractedly on the keys as Parney rocks on his living room chair and Maida sips her tea. It’s a dissociative trajectory or impulse, playfully deconstructing the structure of the trial even as it is happening, not unlike an improvisational passage in a piece of jazz music, and its closest cognate within the trial is Manion’s own claim to have experienced “irresistible impulse,” as a result of his time in the Korean War; a new iteration of shellshock that produces “dissociative action” in which “he might appear to be deadly calm, fiercely deliberate,” like the film itself, even as his thoughts are elsewhere. Like any jazz piece, too, the improvisation returns us to a more restless and elasticised version of the main theme, which in this case amounts to something of a playful non-resolution. Despite the jury’s finding, Biegler’s last encounter with Laura Manion, on the brink of the courthouse, is suffused with flirtatious ambiguity, although in a playful key, rather than the doomed fatalism of noir. Likewise, Manion skips out on Biegler’s fee, and invokes this very dissociative state as his reason for doing so, writing Biegler a comic letter about his “irresistible impulse” not to pay for the case, calling his entire defence into doubt in the process. Yet Biegler does achieve a kind of jazzy justice, since Mary’s enlistment of him to manage her late father’s estate means that there’s going to be enough money to keep him, Parney and Maida in their comfortable semi-family for years to come. All these strands come together in the closing scene, which sees Biegler and Parny arriving at a local lake, in what initially feels like a fishing expedition (pun intended), or something considerable more domestic and intimate, only for us to realise they are visiting Manion’s caravan park in expectation of payment. But he is long gone, leaving only his playful letter, and an empty space, a comic aporia, a hollowing-out of the film’s discursive apparatus, now dissolved into the intensifying jazz score, in a kind of parodic undoing and elasticising of the entire trial – as if the trial itself were only a flamboyant counter-demonstration, the structure and melody needed for a line of flight to a better and more improvised world.