Hollywood Codebreakers: ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ Uses the Actual Language of Sexual Assault
It’s the night before the big trial, and the local bar is packed. Everyone is dancing, but as Paul Biegler looks over the crowd, he can’t stop staring at one guest: Laura Banion. She’s the wife of his client Frederick Banion, currently charged with the murder of Barney Quill — the man Laura has accused of rape.
As Laura laughs and bounces from one dancing partner to the next, it’s clear she’s having a great time. Maybe the best time anyone’s ever had. Which is why Biegler discreetly pulls her outside and tells her she’s going home. When she protests, he snaps:
“Now you listen to me, you listen. Now until this trial is over, you’re going to be a meek little housewife with horn-rimmed spectacles. And you’re going to stay away from men and juke joints and booze and pinball machines. And you’re going to wear a skirt and low-heeled shoes and a girdle. Especially a girdle.”
Laura instantly understands. It’s not that Biegler is a prude — he’s simply a shrewd defense attorney, and he knows that this trial rests on whether Laura is the right kind of rape victim. “Meek housewives” are the right kind, the only kind really. Women like Laura aren’t just the wrong kind. The jury might doubt they were victims at all.
Anatomy of a Murder is a surprisingly modern movie for 1959, one that understands the way rape culture puts victims on trial for the crimes of their abusers. It was also modern in its clinical use of the language of sexual assault. Over the course of the movie, Biegler references “sexual climax,” a “contraceptive,” and, many times over, “panties,” which were all words rarely uttered onscreen at the time. But Anatomy of a Murder passed the PCA with very few compromises, challenging what the Code considered “vulgar expressions” through dialogue you’d hear in an actual courtroom.
Lawyer John Voelker was inspired to write Anatomy of a Murder after taking on the case of Lieutenant Coleman Peterson. The military man shot Maurice Chenoweth in a Michigan bar after his wife Charlotte accused Chenoweth of rape. But with Voelker’s help, Peterson was acquitted on the murder charge by claiming temporary insanity. He took off after the 1952 trial, stiffing Voelker on the bill and leading many to wonder how much of his story was true. Voelker capitalized on this intrigue by fictionalizing the proceedings into a 1958 book that quickly became a hit, under the pen name Robert Traver.
Otto Preminger wanted to make the sensational story into a movie, and he signed an impressive cast onto the adaptation. Jimmy Stewart would play the Voelker avatar, with Lana Turner as the woman at the center of the trial. When Turner dropped out over a dispute with Preminger, she was replaced with Lee Remick, a relative newcomer who’d made her screen debut in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd just a year earlier. Duke Ellington would also appear in the movie, and provide the score. But most interesting of all was the man chosen to play the trial judge. He was not an actor, but an actual attorney — and a pretty famous one at that. Joseph N. Welch had served as counsel for the U.S. Army during the Army-McCarthy trials, and in one indelible moment, he asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
Voelker, who was by then serving on the Michigan Supreme Court, worked closely with the creative team to develop a faithful legal drama. Once the script by Wendell Mayes was complete, Preminger met with Geoffrey Shurlock on December 8, 1958 to go over the pages. The PCA chief flagged a lot of different words, but mostly ones that described what had happened between Laura and Barney Quill. “The references to ‘sperm,’ ‘sexual climax,’ ‘penetration,’ etc. seem to us to be hardly suitable in a picture to be released indiscriminately for mixed audiences,” Shurlock wrote to Preminger in a letter. “It also seems to us that there is an overemphasis on the words ‘rape’ and ‘panties’ to the point where this element possibly becomes offensive.” Preminger nixed a few lines to address Shurlock’s complaints, and changed the word “sperm” to the much vaguer “evidence.” He also switched “penetration” to “violation,” even after insisting that the word was part of the legal definition of rape. But Preminger would not budge on the other lines, believing they were too important to the story.
He wasn’t wrong. It would’ve been impossible to stage the trial — which takes up a solid two-thirds of the movie — without naming the crime Laura accuses Quill of. In the absence of a rape kit, Biegler must interrogate the coroner about the deceased’s “sexual climax” and “spermatogensis,” searching for any physical evidence found on Quill’s body. “Panties” are also key to the case, since a missing pair that Laura describes turns up in the 11th hour, discovered by a surprise witness with a unique connection to Quill. This piece of evidence prompts a sidebar between the judge and lawyers about the proper terminology to use in testimony, which ends with the justice rising to address the court:
“For the benefit of the jury, but more especially for the spectators, the undergarment referred to in the testimony was, to be exact, Mrs. Manion’s panties. I wanted you to get your snickering over and done with. This pair of panties will be mentioned again in the course of this trial and when it happens, there will not be one laugh, one snicker, one giggle, or even one smirk in my courtroom. There isn’t anything comic about a pair of panties which figure in the violent death of one man, and the possible incarceration of another.”
Still, the most shocking word in the Anatomy of a Murder script has nothing to do with rape. It comes from Manion’s cellmate, whom the prosecution calls to deliver damning evidence against the defendant. According to this prisoner’s testimony, Manion was bragging all night about how he was playing his lawyer and the court for suckers, telling everyone that “when he got out, the first thing he was going to do was to kick that bitch from here to kingdom come.” This line prompts an uproar in court and a fearful expression from Laura, implying there might be some truth to this threat of domestic violence.
While it serves to incriminate Manion, the word “bitch” is not nearly as integral to the plot as the laundry list of terms described above. It’s also the most objectively “vulgar” word in the script, the clearest violation of the Code clause banning “vulgar expression” like “SOB” and “son-of-a.” Was “bitch” was only offensive when it applied to men?
Shurlock did flag the word, but Preminger ignored him and still managed to nab a seal of approval. Anatomy of a Murder was scheduled for a summer 1959 release, and it got a very silly trailer to tease its debut. In it, Preminger “swears in” each member of his principal cast (including Welch and Ellington) and then faces an objection from Voelker, who declares the stunt “highly irregular” and insists on a jury. “You see John, our jury is not just 12 men and women in a box,” Preminger says. “Our judge and jury sits out there. Millions and millions of people in the theaters!”
Not everyone was amused. The Legion of Decency issued a “separate classification” for Anatomy of a Murder, urging “restricted use only” over its clinical discussion of rape. In Texas, one theater chain upped the price of admission for children 12–17 to discourage them from seeing it. But the biggest drama came out of Chicago, where the police censor board banned the film on grounds of obscenity. The board objected to the references to rape and contraceptives, though Preminger claimed in his autobiography that it was much simpler than that. “The police chief was Catholic and the word contraceptive to him seemed intolerable,” he wrote. Preminger sued and a judge soon lifted the ban, ruling the movie was not obscene “because its dominant effect does not tend to excite sexual passion or undermine public morals.” Anatomy of a Murder opened in the city mere hours after the verdict, to an ample audience curious over the controversy.
The movie generated another lawsuit from Hazel Wheeler, the widow of Maurice Chenoweth, who took Columbia Pictures to court over libel and invasion of privacy. (She lost.) But otherwise, Anatomy of a Murder had a fairly smooth release. It reportedly grossed $2 million in its first six weeks, and received generally positive reviews. Critics highlighted the bold dialogue, hailing the “realism” of the script. “There are a few scenes that contain language certainly never heard before in an American film with a Code Seal,” Variety noted.
Anatomy of a Murder was and still is framed as a trailblazer, but court decisions surrounding it reveal a lingering reluctance to abandon film censorship. In the Chicago trial, the judge who ruled in Preminger’s favor also refused to dismantle the police censor board — in fact, he affirmed their right to restrict “immoral and obscene” films. Anatomy of a Murder just wasn’t one of them.
The movie was often discussed alongside the French version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which won a legal victory within weeks of the Chicago case. New York had tried to ban the movie, but the Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional, prompting a fresh wave of speculation about the future of censorship. Herman M. Levy, counsel for the Theater Owners of America, called on local censor boards to “cease their operations immediately,” but far more legal minds treated the news with a grain of salt. “Lawyers specializing in film censorship hold little hope that the present Supreme Court will go all out and strike down prior restraint altogether,” Variety reported. “They see each contested case going up to the Court and being judged based on its merits, with the justices in effect becoming the arbiters of whether or not a given film qualifies under the terms immoral or obscene.”
Our final film of the 1950s was certainly a “contested case,” although it didn’t appear before the Supreme Court. Suddenly, Last Summer was another controversial Tennessee Williams drama consumed with “deviant” sexuality, but even for Tennessee Williams, this was pretty extreme. The movie was initially rejected by the PCA for its gay villain and some light cannibalism, eventually earning a Seal after careful negotiations. We’ll discuss it next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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