SYNOPSIS
This is probably the greatest courtroom drama ever made and it features James Stewart's finest screen performance. Controversial in its day for using words such as "panties" and "spermatogenesis", Otto Preminger's film enthrals for nearly three hours as its story about a rape and murder unfolds. As hick lawyer (and jazz fan) Paul Biegler, Stewart is drawn into the case, suckered by it, and comes up against big-town prosecutor George C Scott. Their courtroom duels and stunts are mesmerising, revealing an America leaving its traditional moral values behind; this is the America not of apple pie but of Lolita. The judge, by the way, is played by Joseph N Welch, a Boston lawyer and outspoken critic of the McCarthyist witch-hunts, who got the part after Spencer Tracy and Burl Ives turned it down. That Stewart's character loves jazz was a neat excuse to bring in the great Duke Ellington to write the soundtrack; Ellington even appears in one scene in a club, playing a duet with Stewart. The film is based on a novel by Robert Traver, the pen name of retired judge John D Voelker.
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