Production
The film was shot in several locations in the Upper Peninsula (Big Bay, Marquette, Ishpeming, and Michigamme). Some scenes were actually filmed in the Thunder Bay Inn in Big Bay, Michigan, one block from the Lumberjack Tavern, the site of a 1952 murder that had inspired much of the novel.
The Lumberjack Tavern is still in existence today. The murder scene body outline is still there, although it is possibly a restoration and not the original outline.
The members of the jury panel from the original trial were contacted and asked to sit on the set. With the exception of a few that had either died or moved, most appeared in the film. The missing ones were replaced with local residents.
The script featured unusually frank dialog for 1959. It was among the first Hollywood films to challenge the Hays Code, along with Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).
The role of the judge was offered to both Spencer Tracy and Burl Ives, but ultimately went to Joseph Welch, who had made a name for himself representing the U.S. Army in hearings conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Welch who famously asked of McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch accepted the part only after Preminger agreed to let his wife be on the jury.
Chicago newspaper columnist Irv "Kup" Kupcinet has a small uncredited role in the film. Duke Ellington, who composed the music, appears as "Pie-Eye", the owner of a roadhouse, with whom Jimmy Stewart's character plays piano.
Read more about this topic: Anatomy Of A Murder
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
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“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)