Movie Quote of the Day (“Anatomy of a Murder,” on the Miracle of Juries)

Parnell Emmett McCarthy (played by Arthur O’Connell): “Twelve people go off into a room: twelve different minds, twelve different hearts, from twelve different walks of life; twelve sets of eyes, ears, shapes, and sizes. And these twelve people are asked to judge another human being as different from them as they are from each other. And in their judgment, they must become of one mind - unanimous. It's one of the miracles of Man's disorganized soul that they can do it, and in most instances, do it right well. God bless juries.”—Anatomy of a Murder, screenplay by Wendell Mayes, adapted from the novel by John D. Voelker (under the pen name Robert Traver), directed by Otto Preminger

One of the many pleasures of Otto Preminger’s classic—released on this date in 1959—is O’Connell’s performance as the smartest alcoholic attorney since Charles Dickens’ Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Too bad the veteran character actor saw his chance for Best Supporting Actor at Oscar time undercut by a fellow cast member, who ended up splitting their vote from Academy members before he went on to an even more illustrious career of his own in starring roles: George C. Scott.

To hit it big at the box office, Preminger shrewdly milked the notoriety of a censorship battle, sparked by courtroom dialogue over women’s undergarments. If that were all the film had to recommend it today, it would attract about as much interest as Jane Russell's The Outlaw.

But as it happens, there’s a thousand times more to it than a few words—starting, but by no means ending, with James Stewart’s performance as Paul Bigler, whose folksy I’m-just-a-country-lawyer schtick became the prototype not just for his own short-lived 1970s TV series, Hawkins, but also for Andy Griffith’s far longer-running Matlock.

Take the movie’s score by the incomparable Duke Ellington (who appears briefly but memorably as the musician “Pie Eye”). Just as his band at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival took its cue during its incendiary performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" from a young blonde in the audience who leaped to her feet and began to dance, so his sly, sexy, unexpected film music followed the emotional lead of another sultry blonde, Ben Gazzara’s flirtatious wife (played by Lee Remick).

It is Remick’s character who produces “the disorganized soul” of the man who may or may not have raped her, as well as the husband who took revenge. The preposterous aim of the legal profession, O’Connell’s McCarthy tells us, is to ferret out the truth in the infinite wilderness of human hearts such as theirs. A collective “disorganized soul” in the jury box then must make sense of it all.

Over the last 20 years—notably at the O.J. Simpson criminal trial—the wisdom of juries has come into question. That should not lessen our appreciation for the enormous task that Parnell Emmett McCarthy hails, with Celtic eloquence, in one of the finest films of the postwar period.