Best movie ever!

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

James Stewart was one of those everlasting good guys of classic Hollywood, portraying honest and slightly naive characters fighting the system. His role as a inexperienced young lawyer that has to crack a murder case that doesn't seem to look as easy and straightforward as it did when the trail began. Director Otto Premminger isn't letting anything slip by unnoticed, dissecting the trail process to the very smallest details with discreet, but fanatical persistency. Stewart and Remmick are dancing their dance of hunter and the hunted with ease, while the cross examinations flawlessly manage to raise the temperature of the plot until the very climax and the not so anticipated ending. "Anatomy of a murder" laid down the foundation for many trail movies while simultaneously enthroning the cross examination as a foundation of the Anglo-Saxon law system.

ANATOMY OF A MURDER is a mystery courtroom drama, which, in one explicit manner, deals with issues of sex and rape. The film was based on the 1958 novel of the same name by Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker.One former local prosecutor has taken a peculiar case. Specifically, an army lieutenant has confessed to killing his wife's rapist. The lieutenant, with the help of his new defense attorney, claims that he does not remember the murder. The main feature of the defendant is temporary mental incapacity. However, some visible facts are not on his side....The story is interesting and somewhat realistic. It was complemented with a sharp dialogue and explicit themes. Mr. Preminger has presented a dramatic, but a proper and comprehensive judicial process. He has pointed, through some notable scenes, the difference between law and justice. The protagonists are shifty characters in an uncertain courtroom drama. The conflict is reduced to a battle between prosecutors and defense counsel, through comic theatricality and mutual insinuations.James Stewart as Paul Biegler is a clever and resourceful lawyer. The protagonist who, with his petty bourgeois, regularly draws aces from the hole. Mr. Stewart has offered, as usual, very good performance. Lee Remick as Laura Manion is rather unconvincing as a faithful and flirty wife at the same time. The complexity is perhaps the biggest flaw of her character. However, I think that Mr. Preminger has wanted to provoke an ironic attitude towards her character by the audience. George C. Scott as Claude Dancer is a skilled and consistent prosecutor, who has become a sort of antagonist. Ben Gazzara as Lt. Frederick Manion is a cold and nervous defendant. Joseph N. Welch as Judge Weaver, despite his sporadic cynicism, is too stereotypical character.This is a bit tiring, but very interesting trial, which, through ironic and cynical attitudes, solves the mystery.

I expected much more from this movie, as it had got such good marks and reviews. Instead I found it boring, uninteresting, failing to engage. One problem was that I could not feel anything for anyone concerned. Both the accused and his wife were unlikeable - and the murder victim we never got to see at all, as there were no flashbacks. Even James Stewart as the defence lawyer, whom I normally like a lot, was strangely uninteresting and even physically ugly in this movie. The whole thing was somehow flat... I at least expected some big, surprising twist at the end - but there was nothing like that either. It is difficult at the best of times to make a court-room drama - if it only (or almost only) takes place in the court-room after the crime, as in this movie - interesting. This movie was not one of the few exceptions.

The charge is murder. The defense is that the defendant was legally insane, because his wife had been raped by the victim. The trial testimony focuses almost exclusively on whether she had or had not been raped (the implicit alternative being that she'd had consensual sex with the victim). But all that mattered was whether the defendant believed she's been raped, not with whether she really had been or not. Furthermore, one would expect the focus of the trial to be on the expert psychiatric testimony. That was over and done with in a couple of cursory scenes. It was as if the victim was on trial for rape. Meanwhile, the two attorneys are yelling at each other and getting in the witnesses' faces, while the judge sits there like a potted plant and occasionally warns them that they'd better behave (which he never follows through on). Awful.