An irresistible impulse to play it again and again: Anatomy of a Murder, which just got Criterion-ized, featured the first Hollywood film score by a black composer

Anatomy of a Murder star Lee Remick, Duke Ellington and bassist Jimmy Woode

Otto Preminger's 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, which finally received the Criterion Collection treatment last week, is a classic of the courtroom genre. Every time Anatomy of a Murder turns up on TCM, I get an irresistible impulse a la the late Ben Gazzara's hotheaded soldier client character to stop whatever I'm doing and revisit the entire (and rather lengthy) film or at least a chunk of it.

Criterion posted three reasons why AOAM continues to shine, especially in a bothersome age of right-leaning, constantly-parodied-during-NTSF:SD:SUV:: procedurals, or as I like to call them, "Dad shows."



I second those reasons, but I'd combine reasons #1 and #3 so that it's "It gets the law right and it's not all black and white" and give the reason #3 slot to Duke Ellington's sensational, Grammy-winning score. It captures well both the tranquil Sunday-morning-stroll-through-the-town-square side (like in "Sunswept Sunday" and "Low Key Lightly") and the seamy white-trash side of the film's small-town Michigan backdrop (some, like Wynton Marsalis, think that the score is poorly edited into the film, a gripe that Marsalis expressed while discussing Ellington's score in the liner notes of Sony Legacy's 1999 AOAM CD reissue, which can be heard during the "AFOS Prime" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks).

Besides introducing then-controversial words like "intercourse," "contraceptive," "spermatogenesis" and "panties" into movie houses where conservatives reacted to hearing those words by crapping said panties, AOAM is notable for containing the first original score for a Hollywood film written by an African American composer. (A year before Ellington's effort, Miles Davis contributed a score to a French film, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, a.k.a. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.) It's fitting that Criterion drops the AOAM Blu-ray during Black History Month because of that milestone.

The first Hollywood score by an African American is distinguished by a catchy theme Ellington described as "gutbucket." Written for the bass and first known as "Pie Eye's Blues," the composition wasn't originally intended to be the film's main theme. It was supposed to represent Pie Eye, the roadhouse bandleader character played by Ellington during his cameo in AOAM (in South Africa, Ellington's scene with Jimmy Stewart was banned from the film because interracial two-man piano playing was apparently too disturbing for them). But then someone in the AOAM crew changed the order of the cues ("Was this Duke's idea?," wondered CD reissue producer Phil Schaap in the reissue liner notes) and must have found "Pie Eye's Blues" to be the perfect fit with those jazzy and striking Saul Bass opening titles, and the rest is history.



Then Sir Duke handed AOAM's main theme over to Peggy Lee, who added lyrics to the melody in her cover version, which was titled "I'm Gonna Go Fishin'," a nice reference to the film it originated from and its main character's love of fishing.

After Ellington's AOAM score, in walked Quincy Jones (who had an impressive hot streak of crime or comedy film and TV series scores from the '60s to the '70s) and then the slightly less prolific blaxploitation-era likes of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Johnny Pate and J.J. Johnson (while over on the Asian American side, Japanese American composer Paul Chihara contributed scores to Death Race 2000 and Prince of the City). Then in the '90s, Stanley Clarke, the still-active Terence Blanchard (who did a cover of the AOAM main title theme for his 1999 Jazz in Film album) and even RZA followed in Ellington and Jones' footsteps. They all penned great original scores, but there needs to be more film and TV composers of color besides those maestros.

Court's adjourned.

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

If you've never seen the Newman cult favorite Slap Shot, you're missing out on one of the 10 greatest sports flicks of all time. After reading about the death of Newman, whose performances I've always enjoyed watching because of what Alan Sepinwall calls Newman's "anti-vanity," I immediately popped into my DVD player the only Newman movie in my DVD collection, Slap Shot. (I wish I had a copy of Nobody's Fool in my collection, but Slap Shot sufficed.)

Every time someone posts a list of their favorite sports movies, they tend to pick the earnest ones (Rocky, Rudy, Field of Dreams, The Pride of the Yankees) as their favorites. You know, movies that make grown men cry? To borrow a classic Kay Howard line from Homicide: Life on the Street, "Oh, make me puke!" I prefer the more off-kilter and humorous sports flicks like Slap Shot, Diggstown, Breaking Away and Shaolin Soccer.

Nobody's Fool may be my favorite Newman movie, but Slap Shot contains my favorite Newman character, Reggie Dunlop, the aging hockey coach with a rather relaxed attitude towards on-the-rink behavior. Dunlop's insults are so delightfully foul-mouthed and politically incorrect that I'd hate to see what this movie is like when it airs on basic cable ("You know, your son looks like a fuddy-duddy to me. You better get married again 'cause he's gonna wind up with somebody's sock in his mouth before you can say Jack Robinson.").

I doubt TCM will include Slap Shot in its inevitable Newman marathon tribute. Even though TCM never censors its movies, I don't think they've ever aired a movie that's filled to the brim with F-bombs like Slap Shot.

Moviegoers in 1959 winced when they saw Jimmy Stewart discuss panties and sperm in the courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. They probably had a coronary when they heard Newman curse up a storm in Slap Shot.

No wonder Newman considered Dunlop to be his favorite character and called Slap Shot the most fun movie shoot he ever did. I guess he didn't mind wearing what has to be some of the ugliest pants in movie history. (Plaid trousers? That pair of bell-bottom leather pants Newman tried to rock later in the film? Not even someone as cool as Newman in Slap Shot, Kurt Russell in Escape from New York or Eddie Murphy in his concert movies could persuade me to slip into a pair of leather pants. There are two things I'll never wear: leather pants and open-toed shoes. They're the least manly-looking pieces of fashion ever invented.)

It's interesting that Newman's final role was in another sports movie (and an animated one too!), Cars. I'm glad he went out as a talking Hudson Hornet instead of a planet-eating lardass.

"Shutup, I Love This Title Screen," Part 7

Anatomy of a Murder
Title design by Saul Bass