The Big Sleep (Michael Winner, 1978)

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Richard Boone, Candy Clark, Joan Collins, Edward Fox, John Mills, James Stewart, Oliver Reed, Harry Andrews, Colin Blakely, Richard Todd. Screenplay: Michael Winner, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. Cinematography: Robert Paynter. Production design: Harry Pottle. Film editing: Frederick Wilson. Music: Jerry Fielding. 

Just don't. At least not unless you've seen Howard Hawks's 1946 version of Raymond Chandler's novel, which is set, as it should be, in Los Angeles. The shift of the action to London is disastrous, necessitating some lame exposition about why Philip Marlowe and the Sternwood clan are in England. Chandler's plot remains as enigmatic as ever, but in the hands of Hawks and screenwriters Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett, and William Faulkner, we didn't much care whodunit and why. Michael Winner's screenplay just leaves us with a muddle that has no redeeming flavor and texture. Seldom has a cast of superbly accomplished actors been so sadly wasted as they are here under Winner's direction. 

Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Cast: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally, Millard Mitchell, Charles Drake, John McIntire, Will Geer, Jay C. Flippen, Rock Hudson, John Alexander, Steve Brodie, James Millican, Abner Biberman, Tony Curtis, James Best. Screenplay: Robert L. Richards, Borden Chase, based on a story by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun, Nathan Juran. Film editing: Edward Curtiss.

Winchester '73 fetishes the titular firearm as if it were Excalibur or the Shield of Achilles. Which is all to the point if you're mythmaking, as this film, the first of a series of five movies on which James Stewart collaborated with director Anthony Mann, distinctly is. It's not only a contribution to the myth of the American West, but its central conflict is based on the story of Cain and Abel, with a touch of Oedipus thrown in. Sibling rivalry -- I almost wrote "sibling riflery" -- never got hotter. This is the only one of the Stewart-Mann Westerns that wasn't made in color, but it hardly matters: William H. Daniels photographs the high desert country of Arizona as lovingly as he ever filmed Greta Garbo. The film also holds a place in Hollywood movie history because of the deal Stewart's agent made guaranteeing the actor a percentage of the profits -- a step toward the disintegration of the studio system that would accelerate through the 1950s. But it might also be noted that the studios still held some power: Two up-and-coming Universal contract players, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis, both have small roles in the film, the former in war paint and a fake nose as the Indian chief Young Bull, the latter in a bit part as a cavalryman who admires the rifle on which the plot centers. Winchester '73 is one of the great Westerns not because it questions the myths (and the clichés, such as Shelley Winters's "dance hall girl" with a heart as gold as her hair) on which the genre is founded, but because it so wholeheartedly accepts and integrates them into a well-paced and entertaining movie.

You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938)

Halliwell Hobbes, Spring Byington, Dub Taylor, Ann Miller, and Mischa Auer in You Can't Take It With You

Alice Sycamore: Jean Arthur
Martin Vanderhof: Lionel Barrymore
Tony Kirby: James Stewart
Anthony P. Kirby: Edward Arnold
Kolenkhov: Mischa Auer
Essie Carmichael: Ann Miller
Penny Sycamore: Spring Byington '
Paul Sycamore: Samuel S. Hinds
Poppins: Donald Meek
Ramsey: H.B. Warner
DePinna: Halliwell Hobbes
Ed Carmichael: Dub Taylor
Mrs. Kirby: Mary Forbes
Rheba: Lillian Yarbo
Donald: Eddie Anderson
Charles Lane: Henderson
Judge: Harry Davenport

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick

"Opening up" a stage play when it's adapted for the movies is standard practice, and even a necessary one when the play takes place on a single set the way George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It With You does. But director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin have done more than open up the play, they have eviscerated it, scooping out much of its wisecracking satire on bourgeois conformity and red-scare jitters to replace them with Capra's characteristic sentimental populism, some high-minded speeches about Americanism, and a rather mushy romance. It unaccountably won the best picture Oscar and Capra's third directing award, in a year when the nominees included Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion. Capra and Riskin load on a kind of superplot: an attempt by the villain, Anthony P. Kirby, to corner the munitions market by buying up the property surrounding his rival's factory. The property includes the home of Grandpa Vanderhof and his family of Sycamores and Carmichaels, along with some others who turned up there at one time or another and just stayed on to pursue their various eccentric pastimes, which include making fireworks in the cellar. The goings-on in the household are enough to sustain the play, especially when Alice Sycamore brings home her boyfriend, Tony Kirby, and he invites his stuffy parents to come to dinner. (As in their play The Man Who Came to Dinner, the Kaufman-Hart formula punctures bourgeois stuffiness by putting the squares and the nonconformists into confining circumstances with one another.) The film puts more emphasis on the romance of Alice and Tony with scenes in which they are taught by a group of kids to dance the Big Apple and go to a high-toned restaurant where Alice is introduced to the Kirbys, resulting in some not very funny slapstick. Eventually, the Kirbys and the Vanderhof household wind up in jail and night court, where Capra musters his usual sentimental tribute to the people: As in Capra's 1934 Oscar-winner, It Happened One Night, in which a busload of the common folk join in singing "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," the inmates sharing the cell with Grandpa Vanderhof as well as the Kirbys père et fils join in a chorus or two of "Polly Wolly Doodle." (A cut to the other occupants of the cell reveals a throng of fresh-faced working men, not the thugs and drunks you'd expect to find.) And in the courtroom scene, Grandpa's neighbors gather to pay his fine, with even the judge tossing some money into the hat. All ends well, of course: Mr. Kirby decides not to buy the Vanderhof house after his defeated rival suffers a fatal heart attack. (The rival, Ramsey, is played by H.B. Warner, who as Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings saved all of mankind with his death; here his death just saves Anthony P. Kirby's soul.) Kirby undergoes a wholly unconvincing change of heart, and we end with all of the Kirbys, Sycamores, Carmichaels, and hangers-on at the dinner table where Grandpa delivers a prayer of thanks. Capra never got cornier than this.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)

James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Jefferson Smith: James Stewart
Clarissa Saunders: Jean Arthur
Sen. Joseph Paine: Claude Rains
Jim Taylor: Edward Arnold
Gov. Hopper: Guy Kibbee
Diz Moore: Thomas Mitchell
Chick McGann: Eugene Pallette
Ma Smith: Beulah Bondi
Senate Majority Leader: H.B. Warner
President of the Senate: Harry Carey
Susan Paine: Astrid Allwyn
Mrs. Hopper: Ruth Donnelly
Sen. MacPherson: Grant Mitchell
Sen. Monroe: Porter Hall
Himself: H.V. Kaltenborn
Nosey: Charles Lane
Bill Griffith: William Demarest
Sweeney Farrell: Jack Carson

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Sidney Buchman
Based on a story by Lewis R. Foster
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Lionel Banks
Film editing: Al Clark, Gene Havlick
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Perhaps only James Stewart (or Gary Cooper, who turned down the role of Jefferson Smith) could have made Frank Capra's preposterous, sentimental, flag-wavingly patriotic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington into what many people still regard as a beloved classic. But now that we've spent some time being governed by probably the most corrupt man ever to hold the White House, a president elected on populist promises to "drain the swamp" in Washington but who instead has spent his time wallowing in it and stocking it with still more alligators, maybe we can take a harsher look at the Capra film's politics. The people who elected Donald Trump seem to have thought they were voting for Jefferson Smith but instead elected the movie's Jim Taylor (played deliciously by that fattest of character actor fat cats, Edward Arnold). David Thomson, among others, has cogently observed that the film celebrates Jefferson Smith's bull-headed integrity, but that democracy necessarily involves the kind of compromises that Claude Rains's Senator Paine has made, and which have made him a popular and successful politician. True, he's under the thumb of the viciously corrupt Jim Taylor, who is even a manipulator of "fake news," but Thomson questions whether the people of Smith's state wouldn't have benefited more from the dam Taylor wants to put on Willett Creek, presumably one that would supply power and other benefits to the state, than from Smith's piddly boys' camp, which would benefit at best a few hundred boys. (No girls need apply?) Smith's dramatic filibuster also seems to be holding up a bill that would provide funding for some essential services. As it happens, I rewatched Mr. Smith on the night after the Senate reached an impasse on funding the entire federal government, and there could hardly be a better example of political stubbornness undermining the public good. Which is only to say that the merits of Capra's film -- and there are some -- transcend its simple-minded fable. Among its merits, it's beautifully acted, not only by Stewart, Rains, and Arnold, but also by Jean Arthur, that most underrated of 1930s leading ladies, and Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in no fewer than three of the films nominated for the best picture Oscar for 1939 -- this one, Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming), and Stagecoach (John Ford) -- and won the supporting actor award for Stagecoach. And just run down the rest of the cast list, which seems to be a roster of every great character actor in the movies of that day, all of them performing with great energy. Capra's mise-en-scène is sometimes stagy, but Lionel Banks's great re-creation of the Senate chamber gives Capra a fine stage on which to work.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

It's not hard to see why Alfred Hitchcock would want to remake his 1934 film version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It has good bones: a murder, a kidnapping, a political assassination plot, attractive international locations, colorful villainy, mistaken identifications, and innocents put in jeopardy by sheer accident. But he kind of blew it the first time with pallid protagonists (Leslie Banks and Edna Best), tedious comic byplay involving a sinister dentist, a wacky sun-worshiping cult, and a confusingly staged climactic shootout. Today it's best remembered for Peter Lorre's delicious villainy in his first English-language role. For the remake, Hitchcock supposedly told screenwriter John Michael Hayes not to watch the original or to read its screenplay by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, but to follow his own retelling of the story. The result is a more supple narrative, and the stars, Doris Day and James Stewart, are a definite improvement over Best and Banks. Hayes has made them a rather edgy couple: She's an internationally known musical star who has gone into retirement to marry him, a Midwestern surgeon. He seems to be a bit resentful of her celebrity, and she seems to be a little disappointed at having to settle down in Indianapolis. He's given to outbursts of temper that she sometimes has to quell before he does something rash. Their marital tension never results in an out-and-out fight, but it makes for some uneasy moments. In some respects they verge on '50s stereotypes of male and female roles: He pulls out his medical expertise and administers a sedative to her before telling her that their son has been kidnapped, a rather extreme form of mansplaining. In the 1934 film, Best played an award-winning sharpshooter who fires the shot that kills the villain, while Day is given a softer task: She helps locate their kidnapped son by singing (and singing and singing) "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," the film's Oscar-winning song. The remake is 45 minutes longer than the original, and it seems a little overextended. Still, the performances are good, and Robert Burks's Technicolor cinematography and the Marrakesh location of the first part of the film give the remake a definite edge, as does Bernard Herrmann's score. Herrmann makes his only on-camera appearance conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the "Storm Cloud Cantata" at the Royal Albert Hall, in the pivotal scene that was carried over from the 1934 version.

Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

Montage, the assembling of discrete segments of film for dramatic effect, is what makes movies an art form distinct from just filmed theater. Which is why it's odd that so many filmmakers have been tempted to experiment with abandoning montage and simply filming the action and dialogue in continuity. Long takes and tracking shots do have their place in a movie: Think of the suspense built in the opening scene in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), an extended tracking shot that follows a car with a bomb in it for almost three and a half minutes until the bomb explodes. Or the way Michael Haneke introduces his principal characters with a nine-minute traveling shot in Code Unknown (2000). Or, to consider the ultimate extreme of anti-montage filmmaking, the scenes in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), in which the camera not only doesn't move for minutes on end, but characters also walk out of frame, leaving the viewer to contemplate only the banality of the rooms in which the title character lives her daily life. But these shots are only part of the films in question: Eventually, Welles and Haneke and even Akerman are forced to cut from one scene to another to tell a story. Alfred Hitchcock was intrigued with the possibility of making an entire movie without cuts. He couldn't bring it off because of technological limitations: Film magazines of the day held only ten minutes' worth of footage, and movie projectors could show only 20 minutes at a time before reels needed to be changed. In Rope, Hitchcock often works around these limitations by artificial blackouts in which a character's back fills the frame to mask the cut, but he sometimes makes an unmasked quick cut to a character entering the room -- a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it cut.* But for most of the film, we are watching the action in real time, as we would on a stage. Rope began as a play, of course, in 1929, when Patrick Hamilton's thinly disguised version of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case was staged in London. Hitchcock, who had almost certainly seen it on stage, asked Hume Cronyn to adapt it for the screen and then brought in Arthur Laurents to write the screenplay. To accomplish his idea of filming it as a continuous action, he worked with two cinematographers, William V. Skall and Joseph A. Valentine, and a crew of camera operators whose names are listed -- uniquely for the time -- in the opening credits, developing a kind of choreography through the rooms, designed by Perry Ferguson, that appear on the screen. The film opens with the murder of David Kentley (Dick Hogan) by Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger), who then hide his body in a large antique chest and proceed to hold a dinner party in the same room, serving dinner from the lid of the chest, which they cover with a cloth and on which they place two candelabra. The dinner guests are David's father (Cedric Hardwicke), his aunt (Constance Collier), his fiancée, Janet (Joan Chandler), his old friend and rival for Janet's hand (Douglas Dick), and the former headmaster of their prep school, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). Everyone spends a lot of time wondering why David hasn't shown up for the party, too, while Brandon carries on some intellectual jousting with Rupert and the others about whether murder is really a crime if a superior person kills an inferior one, and Philip, jittery from the beginning, drinks heavily and starts to fall to pieces. Murder will out, eventually, but not after much talk and everyone except Rupert, who returns to find a cigarette case he pretends to have lost, has gone home. There is one beautifully Hitchcockian scene in the film, in which the chest is positioned in the foreground, and while the talk about murder goes on off-camera, we watch the housekeeper (Edith Evanson) clear away the serving dishes, remove the cloth and candelabra, and almost put back the books that had been stored in the chest. It's a rare moment of genuine suspense in a film whose archness of dialogue and sometimes distractingly busy camerawork saps a lot of the necessary tension, especially since we know whodunit and assume that they'll get caught somehow. Some questionable casting also undermines the film: Stewart does what he can as always, but is never quite convincing as a Nietzschean intellectual, and Granger's disintegrating Philip is more a collection of gestures than a characterization. The gay subtext of the film emerges strongly despite the Production Code, but today portrayals of gay men as thrill-killers only adds something of a sour note, even though Dall and Granger were both gay, and Granger was for a time Laurents's lover.

*Technology has since made something like what Hitchcock was aiming for in Rope possible. Alexander Sokurov's 2002 Russian Ark consists of a single 96-minute tracking shot through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg as a well-rehearsed crowd of actors, dancers, and extras re-create 300 years of Russian history. Projectors today are also capable of handling continuous action without the necessity of reel-changes, making possible Alejandro Iñárruitu's Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), with its appearance of unedited continuity, though Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki resorted to masked cuts very much like Hitchcock's.

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

An almost perfect movie. Rear Window has a solid framework provided by John Michael Hayes's screenplay, which has wit, sex, and suspense in all the right places and proportions. The action takes place in one of the greatest of all movie sets, designed by J. McMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock's 12-time collaborator, Robert Burks. The jazzy score by Franz Waxman provides the right atmosphere, that of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, along with pop songs like "Mona Lisa" and "That's Amore" that come from other apartments and give a slyly ironic counterpoint to what L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) sees going on in them. It has Stewart doing what he does best: not so much acting as reacting, letting us see on his face what he's thinking and feeling as as he witnesses the goings-on across the courtyard or the advances being made on him by Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) in his own apartment. It's also Kelly's sexiest performance, the one that makes us realize why she was Hitchcock's favorite cool blond. They get peerless support from Thelma Ritter as Jefferies's sardonic nurse, Wendell Corey as the skeptical police detective, and Raymond Burr as the hulking Lars Thorwald, not to mention the various performers whose lives we witness across the courtyard. It's a movie that shows what Hitchcock learned from his apprenticeship in the era of silent film: the ability to show rather than tell. In essence, what Jeffries is watching from his rear window is a set of silent movies. That Hitchcock is a master no one today doubts, but it's worth considering his particular achievement in this film: It contains a murder, two near-rapes, one near-suicide, serious threats to the lives of its protagonists, and the killing of a small dog, and yet it still retains its essential lightness of tone.

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Yes, Vertigo is a great movie. No, it's not the greatest movie ever made, and to call it that does the film a disservice, inviting skeptics to investigate and overemphasize its flaws. The central flaw is narrative; Vertigo is at heart a preposterous melodrama, and the film raises questions that probably shouldn't be asked: How, for instance, did Scottie (James Stewart) get down from that gutter he was hanging onto after the cop fell to his death? How did Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) arrange to be at the top of that tower with his dead wife at the exact time when Madeleine (Kim Novak) and Scottie were climbing it? Why is the coroner (Henry Jones) so needlessly hostile to Scottie at the inquest? And so on, until the screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor reveals itself to be a thing of shreds and patches. If it is a great film, it's because it had a great director, and that almost no one will gainsay. Alfred Hitchcock drew a magnificent performance from Novak, an actress everyone else underestimated. (And one that he, initíally, didn't want: He was grooming Vera Miles for the role until she became pregnant.) He helped Stewart to one of the highlight performances of his career. He inspired Bernard Herrmann to compose one of the most powerful and evocative film scores ever written -- one whose expression of erotic longing is surpassed perhaps only by passages in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. He worked with cinematographer Robert Burks to transform San Francisco and environs into one of the great movie sets. And he turned what could have been a routine thriller (which is what many critics thought it was at the time of its release) into one of the most analyzed and commented-upon films ever made. It will never be my favorite Hitchcock film: I place it below Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) in my personal ranking of his greatest films, and I enjoy rewatching The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Strangers on a Train (1951) more than I do Vertigo. Yet I still yield to its portrayal of passionate obsession and its masterly blend of all the elements of cinema technology into a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which the whole transcends the sometimes indifferent parts.

The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

Cary Grant was a great listener, which is what made him a great movie actor. Just watch how alert he is when someone else is talking (which is almost all the time in The Philadelphia Story), registering his responses with a slight smile, a tilt of the head, a lifted eyebrow. This was the mark of his career for more than 30 years, working with some of the greatest directors in Hollywood history, from Josef von Sternberg in Blonde Venus (1932) to Stanley Donen in Charade (1963), taking in multiple turns with Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock along the way. Is there an actor with a better filmography? And yet, he was nominated for the best actor Oscar only twice, for the weepies Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941) and None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944), movies that only a Cary Grant fanatic need bother checking out. He wasn't nominated for The Philadelphia Story, either, even though his C.K. Dexter Haven is one of his deftest performances. The Oscar went to his co-star James Stewart, for playing Macaulay Connor in the same movie, an award that even Stewart thought was a consolation prize for not winning the previous year for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra). The great virtue of The Philadelphia Story is the way director George Cukor keeps a large and skillful cast buoyantly aloft, giving Katharine Hepburn her comeback role as Tracy Lord after being labeled "box-office poison" for a series of flops in the 1930s. Hepburn was nominated, too, but lost, rather absurdly, to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle (Sam Wood). The other acting nominee was Ruth Hussey for her delightfully sly Liz Imbrie, a role that should have boosted her career but for some reason didn't. The other Oscar for the film went to Donald Ogden Stewart for his adaptation of the Philip Barry play. Stewart got uncredited help from writer Waldo Salt, which leads to a bitter irony: Both men were blacklisted for their leftist views in the 1950s, even though The Philadelphia Story seems to demonstrate that the very rich sometimes have better values than the working-class Macaulay Connor and Tracy's fiancé, the former coal-miner George Kittredge (John Howard). There isn't a weak link in the cast, which includes the peerless Roland Young as droll and lecherous Uncle Willy, and Virginia Weidler, one of the few child actors one doesn't want to stifle, as Tracy's kid sister, Dinah.

Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)

Kim Novak was an actress of very narrow range, but in the right role and with a good supporting cast, she made a strong, sexy impact, as she does in Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In Bell, Book and Candle, she is paired again with her Vertigo co-star, James Stewart, and surrounded by a supporting cast full of scene-stealers: Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold, and Ernie Kovacs. The movie is nothing special: a fantasy romantic comedy with Novak as Gillian Holroyd, a witch who runs a primitive-art gallery on the ground floor of the apartment house where Shep Henderson (Stewart), a book publisher, lives. She puts a spell on him; he leaves his fiancée, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule), for her but breaks it off when he discovers that he's been hexed. And so on. The movie was made after Vertigo, and Novak and Stewart were re-teamed because of a deal Columbia had made when it loaned out Novak to Paramount for the Hitchcock film. It's not the most plausible of pairings: Novak was 25 to Stewart's 50 -- an age difference that was less problematic in the plot of Vertigo, with its theme of erotic obsession. Stewart chose never to play another romantic lead, but Bell, Book and Candle gives him some good moments to show off his exemplary skill at physical comedy, as in the scene in which he's forced to scarf down a nauseating witches' brew concocted by Mrs. De Passe (Gingold). The screenplay by Daniel Taradash opens up a one-set Broadway comedy by John Van Druten that had starred Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer. It was nominated for Oscars for art direction and for Jean Louis's costumes, but lost in both categories to Gigi (Vincente Minnelli). The cinematography is by James Wong Howe.    

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

Joseph N. Welch, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott in Anatomy of a Murder

Paul Biegler: James Stewart
Laura Manion: Lee Remick
Lt. Frederick Manion: Ben Gazzara
Parnell Emmett McCarthy: Arthur O'Connell
Maida Rutledge: Eve Arden
Mary Pilant: Kathryn Grant
Claude Dancer: George C. Scott
Judge Weaver: Joseph N. Welch

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Wendell Mayes
Based on a novel by John D. Voelker (as Robert Traver)
Cinematography: Sam Leavitt
Music: Duke Ellington

An exceptional film, far more deserving of the year's best picture Oscar than the bombastic Ben-Hur (William Wyler), Anatomy has a lot of great things going for it: the wonderful courtroom conflict between old Hollywood pro James Stewart and Method-trained newcomer George C. Scott; the tension and volatility of Ben Gazzara as the defendant; the presence of such scene-stealers as Arthur O'Connell and Eve Arden in the supporting cast, along with other character actor stalwarts like Murray Hamilton, John Qualen, Orson Bean, Howard McNear, and Jimmy Conlin. And even the "stunt casting" of non-actor Joseph N. Welch, famous for the integrity he showed in his confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings five years earlier, pays off handsomely, with Welch bringing both gravitas and humor to his role as the trial judge. The soundtrack by Duke Ellington also adds a touch of greatness to the movie, which  David Thomson calls "magnificent." Where I think it falls short of magnificence is in the treatment of the rape victim played by Lee Remick. There is, of course, some ambiguity remaining in the film as to whether she was in fact raped, but the part as written by Wendell Mayes and the performance as directed by Preminger turns the presumed victim into an air-headed sex kitten. It's possible that Hollywood, so long precluded by the Production Code from even treating the subject of sexual assault, hadn't yet developed a grammar and vocabulary for dealing with the subject. Remick was a fine actress, and she does manage to show moments of vulnerability in her performance, but the general impression of the character given by the film verges on the despicable "she was asking for it." Preminger had been taunting the Code since The Moon Is Blue (1954) and The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), challenging the strictures on language (the words "virgin" and "seduce") in the former and drug use in the latter. Anatomy continued the assault on prudishness, though few who watch it today will be shocked by its rather clinical discussion of whether Laura Mannion was indeed raped, or be inclined to sniff daintily, as Time magazine did in its review, that the film "seems less concerned with murder than with anatomy."