The controversial film Anatomy of a Murder with music by Duke Ellington shook America up in the late 1950s with taboo subject matter and strong language. By Selwyn Harris.

In 1955, Otto Preminger made The Man With The Golden Arm (Jazzwise 61), the first film to use jazz as the driving force of the score. By focusing on a wannabe jazz drummer’s heroin addiction, the Austrian-Jewish émigré director also challenged the status quo in terms of what was considered suitable subject material for an American audience at the time. It set a precedent whereby jazz, periodically at least, would sign an on-screen pact with the devil.

Filmmakers began to look to jazz as a natural inhabitant of the seedy underworld of film noir; if there were sleazy juke joints, crime, femme fatales and alienation involved, jazz wasn’t too far away. Directors such as Preminger would bring a harsh dose of reality to the screen in a post-McCarthy era of heavy censorship. In 1959 the director again courted controversy in the groundbreaking Anatomy of a Murder. This time though it was for what was being said rather than what was happening on the screen. For The Man With The Golden Arm it was Frank Sinatra’s hysterical druggy persona that upset the censors, whereas in this more sedate courtroom drama it was the “dirty” language that led to a ban in several US cities on release.

The title itself is a cleverly disguised metaphor for the rape that was at the centre of the court trial. The film contained a fruity selection of words that had never been uttered before in commercial cinema up until that point: the contentious words being “rape”, “slut” “sperm”, and an incriminating pair of “panties”. Yet, as a kind of counterpoint to the dramatic nature of the subject material, Anatomy of a Murder didn’t require the usual kind of hard-hitting, urban music of film noir – it’s set, unusually, for the period, on location, in a sleepy American small-town.

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