Preminger’s trial film is nearly as good as its reputation: a defence built in the open, a prosecutor worth the trouble, and James Stewart as a lawyer who knows how useful it is to look harmless. It is long, and unkind to its one woman.
Otto Preminger opens with a man coming home from a fishing trip. Paul Biegler (James Stewart) has lost his job as district attorney of a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and does not seem to mind, since it leaves more time for trout and jazz records. The case that interrupts him is brought by Laura Manion (Lee Remick), whose husband, Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), is in the county jail for shooting a bar owner dead. Manion admits it. He says the man raped his wife. Nobody disputes the shooting, and the 161 minutes that follow are about what the law should call it.
The scene that sets the tone comes early, in the jail. Biegler cannot tell his client to lie, so he explains which defences exist and which of them work, and then goes quiet and waits for Manion to remember how he felt. Wendell Mayes wrote it, from John D. Voelker’s novel, and Stewart plays it with his hat in his hands and his eyes on the floor. We laughed at it, and then we felt uneasy about laughing, because we had just watched a decent man coach a killer and enjoyed his company while he did it. Stewart never lets you settle that. He plays the yokel for the jury, all shuffles and apologies, and then asks a question that lands like a slap.
Preminger and his cameraman Sam Leavitt shoot the whole thing in black and white with the camera held back. Scenes run long and wide, four or five people in the frame at once, and when someone crosses a room the camera goes with them rather than cutting. Louis R. Loeffler edits so little that you notice when he does. Boris Leven’s courtroom is plain wood and tall windows. Vou Lee Giokaris, Paula Giokaris and Hope Bryce do their best costume work on Laura: she arrives in a tight sweater and slacks, and Biegler puts her in court in a shapeless suit, spectacles and a hat, so that the jury will see a wife rather than a woman. The film knows what that costume is for, and so does she.
Duke Ellington’s score is brass and piano and it is kept almost entirely out of the courtroom. It plays over Biegler at home, over the road into town, over a jazz bar, and its absence in court means the trial is scored by voices and chairs. An unusual choice for the period, and the right one.
George C. Scott, as the prosecutor Claude Dancer, is the reason the trial is a contest. He is tight, quick and contemptuous, and he stands between the witness and the jury when he does not want them to see her face. Gazzara plays Manion as a man who despises everyone helping him, and Preminger lets him stay unlikeable to the end. Arthur O’Connell and Eve Arden give Biegler an office that feels lived in, and Arden gets the driest lines in the film.
What the film is not good at is Laura. The script is frank about rape in a way that must have startled in 1959; the trial turns for a while on the word “panties”, and the judge has to tell the courtroom to stop giggling. But the film’s own camera looks at Remick the way the bar did, and the question the trial asks about her, over and over, is what she was wearing and how she behaved. Remick plays her as bored, frightened and pleased to be looked at all at once, which is more than the writing gives her. There is a stretch in the middle of the trial where the procedure is thorough rather than interesting. We checked the time once. Only once.
Most critics rank this with the best trial films made, and we would not argue with them. It refuses to tell us whether Manion is guilty of anything a jury would recognise, and it refuses to tell us whether Biegler is a good man. The 15 certificate is for the subject rather than anything shown. Watch it on an evening when you have the patience for a film that lets its lawyers finish their sentences.
