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Anatomy of a Murder is a 1959 American courtroom drama crime film produced and directed by Otto Preminger. The screenplay by Wendell Mayes was based on the novel of the same name written by Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker under the pen name Robert Traver. Voelker based the novel on a 1952 murder case in which he was the defense attorney. The film stars James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Eve Arden, George C. Scott, Arthur O'Connell, Kathryn Grant, Brooks West (Arden's husband), Orson Bean, and Murray Hamilton. The judge was played by Joseph N. Welch, a real-life lawyer famous for dressing down Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings. It has a musical score by Duke Ellington, who also appears in the film, and has been described by a law professor as "probably the finest pure trial movie ever made". In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
In the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder, Saul Bass literalised the film title by presenting each member of the crew next to disassembled body parts. He first starts by showing the entire body presenting the director Otto Preminger. Then each piece of the body is disassembled and presented like it is part of a puzzle. Using simple elements like cutouts of paper on a uniform grey background, this intro sequence has traversed decades by keeping its cutting-edge quality. No high technology was needed — only a playground in which a graphic designer could think of a simple idea to introduce the film. Today, the Anatomy of a Murder sequence still inspires as one of the greatest opening titles of our time, its influence evident in movies like Catch Me If You Can, Monsters, Inc. and even Thank You For Smoking, which introduces you to the subject of the movie right before it starts. These title sequences all have one of the key qualities Bass introduced in his Anatomy of a Murder sequence: they give a strong, distinct identity to the movie.