Anatomy of Anatomy of a Murder

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Everything rests on the bones. A screenplay functions like a skeleton, with the joints making movement--a plot or story--possible. In the opening credits of Otto Preminger's film Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Screenplay by Wendell Mayes precedes Based on the novel by Robert Of course there's nothing wrong with this, and Mayes' screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay based on material from another medium (it lost to Neil Paterson's Room at the Top). Today Robert Traver's novel Anatomy of a Murder (1958) is largely forgotten, though his best-seller was once a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. If remembered at all, it's for Preminger's film version, which regularly crops up on the Turner Classic Movie channel, and has been available in various VHS and DVD offerings. The high-definition edition from the Criterion Collection (2012), a stamp of approval in itself, was praised by Dave Kehr in the New York Times because it returns substance and shading to this black-and-white classic. (1) In his essay for Criterion's booklet, Nick Pinkerton notes that the film is widely considered among the finest trial films ever made, though he adds, rather sniffily, maybe more universally loved by law students than cineastes.(2) And Foster Hirsch, in his biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (2007), concludes: It's unlikely that there has ever been a more lucid, more unexpected, and more entertaining movie about the law. (3) Yet Hirsch has little to say about Traver's novel, or the bones of the bones; and the seven additional that make up the second disk that accompanies Criterion's release of the film largely ignore Traver. (The features include interviews with Hirsch, with Gary Giddins on Duke Ellington's score, with Pat Kirkham on Saul Bass's credit designs; newsreel footage from 1959 about the making of the film in Ishpeming, Michigan, and Marquette County; location photographs by Gjon Mili; selections from a 1967 episode of the television program Frontline, where Preminger debates a stuffy William F. Buckley Jr. about censorship; and scenes from a documentary film in progress about the making of Preminger's film, drawn from a memoir by Joan G. Hansen.) Enjoyable and sometimes enlightening, none of these addenda discuss Traver or his novel, although he did spend time on the set and appears in various location photographs. If the contribution of screenplays is to be taken seriously, and adaptations regarded as valuable in themselves, it's important to look not only at the differences between a screenplay and a novel but also the issues raised by them. The historical and literary context of Traver's book matters to any discussion of the film. The 1950s are often considered puritanical and prudish, a sexual void. Whatever was happening in the bedrooms across North America--sketched by Alfred Kinsey in Sexual Behavior of the Human Male (1950) at the start of the decade, and followed by Sexual Behavior of the Human Female in 1953--it took years for novels and movies to catch up with the Kinsey Reports, although the moral status quo of Eisenhower's America sometimes seemed to be under siege by entertainers, from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis Presley. Three controversial bestselling novels from the late 1950s focus on a rape and a sensational trial: Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956), James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed (1957), and Traver's Anatomy of a Murder (1958). Each book was transformed into a successful feature film: Peyton Place (1957), directed by Mark Robson; Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959); and By Love Possessed (1961) directed by John Sturges. Of the three novels, none is read today, and the once-scandalous Peyton Place, banned in many American cities and in Canada, is now available in a paperback edition from Northeastern University Press, with a twenty-four page introduction explaining what the fuss was about. …

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