Anatomy of a Murder
I’m just a poor, country lawyer, defending a murderer. Yeah, said murderer is a wife-beater, hyper-jealous, overall 50’s husband, but he was only defending her after she was brutally raped by some dude. Oof, his own incognito daughter came on the stand to charge the dead man.
Testicle-shrivelling detail, the setup before any courtroom scene is one hour long, then 90 minutes of relentless courtroom action, with all the “Objection!” and “if it pleases the court” you can get. Ironically, the final arguments are skipped!
The most jarring part of this is how blasé everyone treats a (gorgeous) woman going to a bar, alone, being driven back by some dude that drives to a secluded place and brutally rapes her. This is treated as a minor sideshow of the really important crime of murder in the first degree involving the men.
Even the victim is pretty chill about all this, but her marriage doesn’t seem so different from that experience. Her most vulnerable moment is when the protagonist enforces some PR notions and drives her back from the bar. She seems to be suffering from an extreme case of depression, going so far as to express suicidal ideation, but again, this is brushed aside.
Coincidentally, Gisèle Pélicot is on a French courtroom now, but that story is too hot for TV now, let alone in 1959. This was written by a Michigan Supreme Court judge under a pseudonym, that’s crazy! The current Supreme Court cohort would fit better as the rapist that got shot.
Not to be confused with Anatomy of a Fall, that’s just a title reference. Twelve Angry Men and A Few Good Men can also be referenced, for contrast. Maybe this a The Big Lebowski prequel, Jacky Treehorn fled Michigan to California and put her wife to work in the burgeoning porn industry, dominating the market ten years later.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.