Beloved by French auteurists even as his name was growing increasingly familiar to the North American mass audience, tetchy Viennese expatriate Otto Preminger was (and still is) considered one of the great Hollywood filmmakers of the 1950s and ’60s. He also prefigured fellow Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger by playing an early incarnation of Mr. Freeze — sadly those episodes of Batman are not part of Cinematheque Ontario’s comprehensive retrospective, which runs from today until July 2. (For a wide-ranging yet concise summation of Preminger’s career and achievements, please refer to James Quandt’s slyly alphabetized inventory in the CO programme guide).

Preminger was surely at the height of his powers in 1959, when his epic-yet-intimate courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Murder garnered seven Oscar nominations. Adapted from Wendell Mayes’ ripped-from-the-legal-headlines novel of the same name, the film casts Jimmy Stewart as a proto-Matlock, country-mouse lawyer defending a US Army lieutenant (Ben Gazarra) accused of murdering the man who raped his wife (Lee Remick).

The contrast between Stewart’s quiet guile and the thunderous rhetoric of George C. Scott as the prosecuting attorney is one of the film’s great pleasures; the same can be said for the then-unheralded Remick’s nuanced turn, which runs the gamut from glamorous to damaged (the moment where she removes her sunglasses to reveal traces of abuse is a classic). Preminger’s direction is similarly elastic, emphasizing the moment-to-moment minutiae of the trial in between some thrillingly theatrical compositions, which are matched in melodramatic intensity by Duke Ellington’s searing jazz score.