IT’S HARD to believe, but James Stewart, the epitome of wholesome America, once got hate mail. “I take my family to see a Stewart picture and you are up there in court talking dirty and holding up women’s panties,” was, the actor recalled, the gist of the letters.

And his crime? Playing the definitive folksy trickster lawyer in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), who defends a soldier (Ben Gazzara) accused of murdering the man he believes raped his floozy wife (Lee Remick).

The film, reissued to coincide with a Preminger retrospective at the National Film Theatre, was shocking for its talk of sperm and torn lingerie. It’s the legal system’s cynicism laid bare that is now striking.

Stewart guides the arrogant Gazzara towards the then acceptable legal excuse of “irresistible impulse”. He introduces inadmissible evidence that angers the big-city prosecutor (George C. Scott, in a star-making turn). “How,” Gazzara whispers, “can the jury ignore what they already heard?” “They can’t,” replies Stewart.

Anatomy of a Murder also shows a real understanding of how lawyers have to be great performers in court. No wonder actors have loved playing legal eagles ever since Lionel Barrymore’s Oscar win for A Free Soul (1931) as a boozy lawyer who delivers a 14-minute monologue to the jury. Actors as diverse as Orson Welles (Compulsion), Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind), Paul Newman (The Verdict) and Joe Pesci (My Cousin Vinny) have all played to the court gallery.

Female lawyers have had less success legally. In Jagged Edge, Glenn Close falls apart after realising that Jeff Bridges, her client and lover, is a murderer. In Suspect, Cher lets a juror do her detective work for their case. At least in Adam’s Rib Katharine Hepburn could spar equally with her attorney-husband (Tracy) and bring an acrobat into the courtroom to wake up the jury.

While lawyers have always been a constant in Hollywood movies, their characters have not. The heroic template of Henry Fonda in Young Mr Lincoln (1939), immortalised by Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), would fall victim to everything from the anti- authoritarianism of the Vietnam era to the lawyer-infested world of Watergate.

By the 1990s, in The Devil’s Advocate, Old Nick himself was running the most powerful law firm in Manhattan. “The law . . . puts us into everything. It’s the ultimate backstage pass, it’s the new priesthood, baby,” cackled Al Pacino in a performance so over the top that it reached Neptune.

Fictional trials have also taught us to expect a third-act bombshell. The accused is rarely guilty, or if he is, he gets off by outfoxing his attorneys, whether it’s Tyrone Power duping Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution or Edward Norton fooling Richard Gere in Primal Fear.

Only Twelve Angry Men had the nerve to confine itself not just to the court, but to an anonymous jury room. Film-makers tend to dress up the usual theatrics by making the court setting as imposing as possible and focusing on unusual trials: war crime hearings (Judgment at Nuremberg); medieval animal court (Hour of the Pig); McCarthy witch-hunts (Guilty by Suspicion).

Directors as different as Sydney Pollack (The Firm), Francis Ford Coppola (The Rainmaker) and Robert Altman (The Gingerbread Man) have all failed to bend John Grisham’s template — crusading lawyer takes on ruthless conglomerate, idealism triumphs over corporate greed — to their own purposes.

It shows that film-makers can pour on more material than any courtroom can contain; in Knock on Any Door, Humphrey Bogart defends a slum kid accused of killing a cop by putting society on trial, relating his client’s life in flashback.

Stick slavishly to court-movie conventions and you end up with a Perry Mason mousetrap, devoid of humanity. Remould the genre and you get such recent forced hybrids as Hart’s War (Grisham meets The Great Escape) and Runaway Jury (Twelve Angry Men meets Bowling for Columbine).

Otto Preminger got the balance right. A Viennese-born Jew and the son of a high legal official in the last Habsburg government, and so a victim and beneficiary of social status, Preminger displayed a ready grasp of the courtroom’s inadequacies. You don’t find justice in his courts, only a kind of temporary satisfaction.

That is all Gary Cooper’s character is after in The Court- Martial of Billy Mitchell, in which a US Army aviation pioneer in the 1920s is put on trial for insubordination after accusing the war department of criminal negligence. Preminger makes it clear that Mitchell is a victim of his own scruples; the officer refuses to let his lawyer mount a broad attack that would pressure the Army into backing down. And the court-martial becomes a study in victimisation, with Mitchell’s technical guilt and higher innocence never in doubt.

But Preminger’s greatest courtroom epic is Anatomy of a Murder. It not only has a real judge presiding — Joseph Welch, the lawyer who delivered the stinging speech that Robert De Niro gives at the end of Guilty by Suspicion and brought down Joseph McCarthy — but also an ambiguity that suffuses the whole film.

It starts by showing details in Stewart’s life, his interaction with a drunken lawyer friend (Arthur O’Connell) and his secretary (Eve Arden), his love of fishing and jazz piano (once, in a bar scene with Duke Ellington, who wrote the film’s great score). The director is not so much building up to the suspense sequences as showing us that courtrooms and trials can only be a small part of life. Anatomy of a Murder ends with a verdict but not a judgment.

Preminger mastered the courtroom drama because he knew that the less matters were settled by trial, the more meaning the whole exercise would have.

• Anatomy of a Murder is rereleased on April 15

  REEL INJUSTICE: LEGAL HOWLERS

  Twelve Angry Men Juror Henry Fonda is legally in contempt for investigating and giving evidence to the court himself

  Philadelphia In trying to prove that Aids-afflicted lawyer Tom Hanks was wrongfully dismissed, Denzel Washington gives speeches in the middle of the trial and not, as court procedure demands, during closing arguments

  In the Name of the Father Emma Thompson stands up for the Guildford Four, even though her character is a solicitor, not a barrister, so is not qualified to speak in court

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