In 1959, Jimmy Stewart starred in Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom drama that critics still rank among the greatest legal films ever made. What most people watching it never realize is that they are looking at the Upper Peninsula. The story is real, it happened in the tiny town of Big Bay, and the movie was filmed in the actual U.P. places where it all went down, including the bar where a man was really shot.
It started just after midnight on July 31, 1952. An Army lieutenant named Coleman Peterson walked into the Lumberjack Tavern in Big Bay, about thirty miles north of Marquette, and shot the owner, Mike Chenoweth, five times. Peterson’s wife had told him that Chenoweth raped her earlier that night. The lieutenant never denied pulling the trigger in front of a room full of witnesses. The only real question was whether a man could be excused for a killing he claimed he had no power to stop.
The lawyer who lived it, then wrote it
Peterson’s defense went to John Voelker, an Ishpeming native and former county prosecutor who reached for an argument almost no one used, irresistible impulse, a form of temporary insanity that had not been used in a Michigan courtroom since 1886. It worked. After about four hours, the jury found Peterson not guilty by reason of insanity, and his lawyer’s only fee was the pistol itself. Voelker was also a writer. He took the case he had just argued, changed the names, and turned it into a novel under the pen name Robert Traver. Anatomy of a Murder spent more than a year on the bestseller list. Voelker had by then been appointed to the Michigan Supreme Court, and the book did so well that he soon left the bench to spend the rest of his life writing and fishing the U.P. trout streams he loved.
Hollywood came to the U.P.
When Otto Preminger turned the novel into a film, he did something no one had really done before. He moved the entire production to the Upper Peninsula and shot the whole thing on location, where the real story happened. The trial scenes were filmed in the actual Marquette County Courthouse, on the same second floor where Peterson was tried. The bar scenes were shot inside the real Lumberjack Tavern, believed to be the first time a Hollywood movie was ever filmed at the site of an actual murder. Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, George C. Scott, and jazz legend Duke Ellington, who wrote the score and turns up on screen himself, all spent that spring up north. The judge was played by Joseph Welch, the real attorney who had famously faced down Senator Joseph McCarthy on live television a few years earlier.
You can still stand in the scene
What makes it all so wild is how much is still there. The Lumberjack Tavern is still open in Big Bay, and the film’s logo is painted on the floor right where Chenoweth fell. There are still bullet holes in the wall, and if you ask, they will show you the real murder weapon, which no longer works. Down the road, the Thunder Bay Inn still trades on the scenes shot there, and the Marquette County Courthouse still has the courtroom from both the real trial and the movie. You can watch one of the most acclaimed courtroom films ever made, then drive an afternoon and stand in the exact rooms where the true story played out.
It is easy to forget, tucked up here past the bridge, that the U.P. once hosted Jimmy Stewart, a Hollywood crew, and a real murder trial in the same few square miles. But it did. Next time somebody calls Anatomy of a Murder a classic, you can tell them it is also, top to bottom, a Yooper story.
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Sources: Wikipedia "Anatomy of a Murder"; Travel Marquette; The Mining Journal; Marquette County History Museum.
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