The New Pictures

Anatomy of a Murder (Carlyle Productions; Columbia), based on the 1958 bestseller by Robert T raver (pen name of Justice John D. Voelker of the Michigan Supreme Court), is a courtroom melodrama that seems less concerned with murder than with anatomy. In scene after scene, the customers are bombarded with such no-nonsense words as "intercourse . . . contraceptive . . . spermatogenesis . . . sexual climax." And even the least barkbound of spectators may find himself startled to see and hear, in his neighborhood movie house, extended discussion of what constitutes rape ("Violation is sufficient; there need not be a completion ... on the part of the man"), of whether a doctor can or cannot "tell if a married woman has been raped." The Chicago police commissioner, at any rate, was so startled that he banned the film, and the moviemakers eagerly expect that other communities will follow suit.

Actually, it is difficult to take offense at any particular passage in the screenplay. The discussions are conducted with verbal propriety and legal objectivity, and every one of them is necessary to the development of the theme. But it is possible to object to the theme itself, and to suspect that the moviemakers picked it principally because it offered opportunities for sensationalism. Nevertheless, the film displays an attitude toward sex that is more wholesome than the merely sniggering spirit that prevails in many a movie; and for those who can stand the straight talk, it provides a memorable exhibition of legal bicker and dicker, infight and outrage.

The plot: a bartender is murdered by an Army lieutenant (Ben Gazzara), who tells the police he committed the crime because the bartender had beaten and raped his wife (Lee Remick). The wife supports the lieutenant's story, and a lie-detector test, though not admissible in evidence, supports her account of the rape. But the medical examiner finds no physical evidence that the woman was violated. What's more, the lieutenant's wife is a well-known tramp about camp. Obviously, the prosecution reasons, she had been a willing partner in whatever happened with the bartender; she had acquired her bruises at the hands of her jealous husband, who had beaten the truth out of her and then rushed off to kill her lover; and she was now lying to save her husband's life. The defense (James Stewart) contends that both husband and wife are telling the truth, and asks acquittal on the ground that the lieutenant had been rendered "temporarily insane" by what had happened to his wife. The verdict is predictable, but the ending has a surprise twist.

At 160 minutes, Anatomy is longer than the subject warrants, but the pace seldom slackens--thanks to the competence of Director Otto Preminger. The actors--particularly Stewart and Remick--handle themselves like the glossy professionals they are; but a number of important scenes are grandly swiped by that slick old (68) amateur, Boston Lawyer Joseph N. Welch, who plays the judge almost as memorably as he played himself on TV during his historic fracas with the late Senator McCarthy.

Wild Strawberries (Svensk Filmindus-tri; Janus). The important Bergman, so far as the world's art-film buffs are concerned, is not Ingrid but Ingmar. No kin to his sister Swede, 41-year-old Ingmar Bergman is one of the most peculiarly gifted and demoniacally creative moviemakers of modern times--"a gothic Dante," one European critic called him. Son of a famed Stockholm clergyman, Bachelor Bergman works all winter as a director and producer in Sweden's legitimate theater. In spring he retreats to a sanatorium, where he furiously composes scenarios. In summer he makes weirdly beautiful movies--he is now working on his 21st -- that have won him a bagful of major film prizes and made him a coffeehouse celebrity from Stockholm to San Francisco.

Wild Strawberries is Director Bergman's 18th film, and it has been widely acclaimed as his masterpiece--it won the Grand Prize at Berlin's Film Festival last year. It describes a day in the life of a very old, very eminent Swedish physician (Victor Sjostrom). It is the day on which he is to receive an important degree from his university, the crown of his life and work. Strangely, this happy day begins with a horrible dream: he is attending his own funeral, and his own corpse is trying to drag him down into his grave. He recapitulates his life's journey in a series of dreams and daydreams that reveal to him the meaning and unmeaning of his existence. He sees that he is indeed "dead though alive," a whited sepulcher, because his heart is cold. In the end, by living his spiritual death as a felt reality, he experiences his resurrection as a human being.

Like most of Bergman's pictures, Wild Strawberries is smashingly beautiful to see. He works in chiaroscuro--the light expresses the innocence of the doctor's youth, the dark describes the moral gloom of his old age. More important, Bergman employs the language of dream and symbol with an eerie, sleep-talking sureness; some of the old man's dreams are as believable and profound as any ever filmed.

The trouble, on the whole, is that Bergman has a far stronger affinity for the eternal symbol than he does for the living moment, more feeling for ideas than for people. He makes his pictures more as a philosopher conducts an argument than as an artist tells a story. And when he cannot make his ideas clear in action or vision, he does not hesitate to interrupt the flow of the film and say what he means in words, words, words. Bergman's problem seems to be the same as his pro tagonist's as an artist he lives too much in his mind, too little in his feelings; he has hot ideas and a cold heart.

For all its involutions and pedantries, the film has a strong popular appeal, partly because of its theme--the discovery of the heart--but mostly because of Actor Sjostrom (well known to U.S. audiences of the '205 as Director Victor Sea strom, who made such Hollywood successes as The Scarlet Letter and He Who Gets Slapped), who gives a magnificent performance as the doctor. He is Life itself, the unraised Lazarus, the failed Faust.

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