25 Apr 2018

A MONUMENT TO CROSS-EXAMINATION


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 courthouse movies while simultaneously enthroning the cross examination as a foundation of the Anglo-Saxon law system.






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