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Volume 24, Numbers 3 & 4 (2000) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum ANATOMY OF A MURDER TIMOTHY HOFF* Paul Biegler, a bright bachelor lawyer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, would rather be fishing4 than practicing law, but he will take the occasional client in order to pay his faithful secretary and other creditors. His best friend is an older alcoholic lawyer who has long ago given up trying to maintain a practice. Jimmy Stewart plays Biegler, supported by a powerful cast, including Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Eve Arden, and Arthur O’Connell. Appearing in only his second film, 33-year-old George C. Scott plays the role of a big-city prosecutor with the gravity and intensity that would characterize his entire movie career. But it is the light-hearted yet wily character of Biegler that dominates the film. Biegler receives a call from a Laura Manion (Lee Remick), wife of Army Lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), who has been arrested for killing bar-owner Barney Quill with a Luger pistol. There is no question about the fact that Manion has killed Quill. Quill is shot in his bar in the presence of a host of witnesses, and in a manner suggesting that Manion knew exactly what he was doing and that he did it in a deliberate way. The killing takes place some time after Laura tells her husband that Quill has raped her–enough time to suggest that the killing was not done in the heat of passion but with some deliberation. Manion proves to be a problematic client. He is cool, aloof, cerebral, and close to uncooperative with his lawyer. Throughout the film both he and his wife seem less than wholly devoted to one another. She is a voluptuous flirt and he has tired of her company. Only once do we see any sign of physical affection between the husband and wife, and that is in the courtroom and appears staged. More significantly, Manion poses a major problem of professional responsibility for Biegler because of his reluctance to tell his side of the story unless Biegler first tells him the law. That puts Biegler in an ethical quandary familiar to anyone who has practiced law. Telling the client the law in advance of hearing the facts will allow the client to shape his story to fit the law, and may subject the lawyer to a charge of suborning perjury. Rules of professional conduct provide that a lawyer should not assist a witness to testify falsely.5 On the other hand, some experts in the field of professional ethics argue that a lawyer is entitled to act as if he did not know that his client might perjure himself. These experts maintain that the lawyer’s primary task is advocacy and that the judicial system will be best protected against fraud and perjury by the effective working of the adversary system.6 Biegler tells Manion just enough to help his client and probably only enough to avoid a charge of unethical conduct. The more important legal issue in the film, indeed the one central to the plot, is the matter of the proper test for insanity. It appears to both attorney and client that the only viable defense will be that of temporary insanity. But the assumption on the part of Biegler and others in the movie is that Michigan adheres to the classic test for insanity set forth by the House of Lords in 1843 in M’Naghten’s Case.7 Under this test a person is insane if, at the time of acting, he was under a defect of reason caused by a disease of the mind such that he did not know the nature and quality of his action, or, if he did, he was unable to distinguish between right and wrong. Under the circumstances set forth in the trial of Frederick Manion, the M’Naghten test would not be applicable. Witnesses described Manion at the time of the shooting as acting in a deliberate, calculated and business-like way, as if he were a postal worker delivering the mail.8 Some states had actually adopted the irresistible impulse test for insanity, under which a person is insane if at the time of the offense he acts from an irresistible or uncontrollable impulse. But so far as was generally known at that time among lawyers in Michigan–so the screenplay would have us believe–that state adhered to M’Naghten. Even today, standard texts on criminal law9 tell us that the leading American case adopting the irresistible impulse rule is Parsons v. State,10 decided by the Alabama Supreme Court in 1887. But in the film the lawyer-hero Biegler goes to the county law library with his recovering alcoholic sidekick, Parnell Emmet McCarthy (Arthur O’Connell), and while there, after hours of searching, each simultaneously uncovers the opinion of the Michigan Supreme Court in People v. Durfee,11 written in 1886. In that case a trial judge had instructed a jury that the defendant would be of unsound mind “if, by reason of disease, the defendant was not capable of knowing he was doing wrong in the particular act, or, if he had not the power to resist the impulse to do the act by reason of disease or insanity.” Thus the question, said the trial judge, was “did [the defendant] have the power–the will power–to resist the impulse occasioned?” The trial judge’s charge was approved by the opinion of Justice Sherwood for the Supreme Court of Michigan, stating, “These views are in accordance with the doctrine held by this court.” When Biegler shows the Durfee opinion to the trial judge in his chambers, Claude Dancer (George C. Scott), the assistant attorney general from Lansing, who is assisting the local prosecutor in the case, indicates that he was aware of the Durfee case. As trial judge Harlan Weaver scans the Durfee opinion in his chambers, Dancer turns to the local prosecutor, Mitch Lodwick, and remarks, “We’re hooked.” Of considerable interest to moviegoers in 1959 was the casting of Joseph N. Welch as the trial judge, Harlan Weaver. Welch, a successful trial lawyer with the venerable Boston firm of Hale and Dorr, came to national prominence as the attorney for the United States Army in the notorious Army-McCarthy hearings. In May 1954, Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a demagogue who rose to fame as a hunter of supposed communists in government, made accusations of communism against certain army officers. After McCarthy made an reckless attack against Frederick G. Fish, one of Welch’s young law-firm associates, Welch effectively demolished the Senator’s red-baiting career with memorable rhetorical flourish. He stood up, faced the Senator, and said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”12 In Anatomy of a Murder, Welch plays the role of a trial judge whose patience is repeatedly tried by the antics of the lawyers in the case, most particularly those of defense attorney Paul Biegler. Welch himself was a man whom Roy Cohn, Senator McCarthy’s aide, would call “a courtly gentleman with an old-fashioned grace of manner; a deft, sly wit, and an unerring sense for the jugular.”13 As much might have been said of the avuncular Judge Weaver. Biegler repeatedly elicits evidence which he knows to be inadmissible, but which he wants the jury to hear. Judge Weaver then has to instruct the jury to disregard the inadmissible testimony, but Biegler has made his point. At times Judge Weaver becomes exasperated enough with Biegler’s antics to threaten him with contempt, but the defense attorney placates the judge with an apology and the disingenuous explanation that he is a simple country lawyer who is zealously trying to protect his client. Welch’s Judge Weaver appears too kindly to be much of a courtroom disciplinarian. But in the tension between the judge and the defense attorney the film raises a crucial issue of professional responsibility: to what extent is an attorney justified in breaching rules of procedure and norms of courtroom etiquette in the cause of zealous advocacy? A formulaic answer to this question is easy: “A lawyer should represent a client zealously within the bounds of the law.”14 In practice, however, the lawyer’s role is always difficult, for “she experiences these pulls in the extreme in the form of a continual tension between the roles of advocate and of officer of the court.”15 In the heat of courtroom battle, one may easily be so swept up in the desire to win that the intricate niceties of the rules of evidence and professional courtesy are forgotten. Anatomy of a Murder illustrates vividly how one lawyer, Paul Biegler, repeatedly faces just this dilemma. A superb story, a splendid cast and artful direction might well have been enough to have made Anatomy of a Murder a cinema classic. But added to all this is a magnificent and unusual score by Duke Ellington,16 who makes a cameo appearance. Although Ellington had never composed a film score, he had already established himself as the preeminent composer of jazz in America.17 Preminger felt that employing Ellington would “produce a freshness which an experienced film composer might no longer possess.”18 Preminger was right. Ellington’s score propels the story forward with its moving rhythms and brilliantly captures the tension and the moral ambiguity that characterize the movie. While there are musical sweet moments, the opening blue notes of the muted trumpet tell us that the story we are about to see is at once wry and compelling. Like Ellington’s jazz, Anatomy of a Murder is full of twists, surprises, and tensions. Both the film and its score remind us that there are moments of ironic delight and wonder to be savored in the midst of life’s uncertainties. |
