Last week I had the opportunity to squeeze in a quick girls’ trip with my sister and our aunt and cousin to spend a few days exploring Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Our home base was an adorable rental cottage on Independence Lake near the tiny unincorporated community of Big Bay, MI, about thirty miles northwest of Marquette and a long, cold swim from Canada.

Though it does have a post office, Big Bay is not large enough to sport a traffic light. It contains around a thousand people during the summer when stunning views of Lake Superior, lots of great hiking trails, waterfalls, and even a good stretch of sandy Great Lake beach attract visitors like us. 

In the winter it may host some hardcore snowmobilers and skiers, but most area locals we met said winter in the UP was best spent either hiding inside or living somewhere else. After experiencing a thirty degree temperature shift from one day to the next, I tend to believe them.

But for all the things Big Bay doesn’t have, it features two excellent places to eat, The Lumberjack Tavern, which includes a sign proclaiming it has been “murder free since 1952,” and The Thunder Bay Inn, which was featured in the Academy Award nominated film Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Jimmy Stewart. 

The film, released in 1959, was based on a novel of the same title by Robert Traver. That was the pen name of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, who in addition to being an avid fly fisherman, served as defense attorney in the case of a murder that occurred at a tavern in the tiny community of Big Bay in 1952.

What made the case such an interesting subject for fiction was the unlikely victory of the defense. An Army lieutenant stood accused of shooting and killing his wife’s alleged rapist. The jury found him not guilty based on a decades old precedent that used a fairly obscure diagnosis of a type of temporary insanity.

It was a good bit of legal acrobatics that translated nicely to the screen under the capable talents of a strong cast and set to a truly excellent Duke Ellington sound track. Since its release, the film has garnered praise from the legal profession as well as accumulated plenty of accolades from the film industry, including a 2012 selection to the National Film Registry for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

Not being a classic film aficionado, I had never seen it, but you don’t vacation on a movie set and not watch the movie. Shortly after arriving back home, I got hold of a copy and I have to say, in my humble opinion, it’s good. 

If you want to visit it, just be forewarned that part of its cultural significance is its unflinching use of descriptive words referencing sexual violence that were atypical for a film in its era, words that got it briefly banned in the highly Catholic city of Chicago. 

Well, maybe not entirely unflinching. There is an amusing interaction in which the judge calls the counselors to the bench to discuss the possible use of alternative words for panties. After some debate in which one suggests perhaps a French word, they determine there are no better alternatives, and decide to just plow ahead, panties and all.

And while it has nothing to do with why we decided to take our little family girls’ trip to the incredibly beautiful UP, it is why unincorporated Big Bay, Michigan, with a year-round population 256, is evidently kind of famous.