Twelve Angry Men (U.)
Directed by Sidney Lumet.
Starring Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Jack Klugman, George Voskovec, Robert Webber, Edward Binns and Joseph Sweeney. 96 mins. Black and white. Released on blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection.
It is cinema's greatest courtroom drama, and it doesn't even take place in one. This tale of jury duty is an undoubted classic, a film that has elbowed its way to a position on a plinth just far another above the hurly burly of artistic squabble to be left unpestered. It has two cultural distinctions that drew me to it. One, it is the inspiration for my favourite ever Galton and Simpson line. In their Half Hour parody of the film, Tony Hancock, the chairman of the Jury, makes as impassioned speech to his fellow jurors including the line, “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?”
More intriguing, and mystifying, is its prominence in the top ten of the IMDB list of its top rated movies. As voted for by readers of the Internet Movie Database, it looks incredibly incongruous among all the Godfathers, Star Wars, Lords of the Ring, Nolans, Spielbergs and Taranatinos, wedged in there at number five between The Dark Knight and Schindler's List. Of all those old upstanding 50s black and white dramas, why does this one – rather than, say, On The Waterfront, or High Noon, or Sunset Boulevard – strike such a chord with keyboard warriors who are more used to spending their energies squabbling over Marvel Vs DC, or whether Han shot first? (This, of course, prior to IMDB closing their messageboards.)
I am at a total lose to explain it really. Whatever you make of the films on that list – and I have no idea how Shawshank made it to No 1 – all the films near the top are absolutely pieces of cinema. Twelve Angry Men, is basically a piece of filmed theatre, albeit one that took a few years to migrate to its natural habitat. The original version was done for TV (it is included among the extras here) and was then turned into this film version at the behest of Fonda. Only A few years later, did stage productions start to be put on. Making his big screen debut, 33-year-old Lumet, already an old pro directing for the stage and TV screen, does an excellent job in keeping it tense and tight. There is limited opening up of the material: it starts in the courtroom and ends on the steps outside, but beyond that it's all in the jury room. There's also a heat wave factored in so everybody is sweating profusely (a continuity nightmare) just to ramp up the intensity. Music is used sparingly, but effectively. It's a very fine piece of filmed theatre, but it is filmed theatre.
As the film is 60 years old I'm hoping spoilers aren't an issue but if you haven't seen it, stop now. The story is about Fonda persuading a jury to look more closely at what looks like an open and shut murder case, a young hoodlum who stabs his father to death, and getting them to open their minds to the possibility that there may be some reasonable doubt about the boy's guilt. It is a stage drama and a very traditional form of stage drama, the whodunnit, or in this case a heneverdunnit. Fonda is the maverick detective, our Columbo, our Poirot, and one by one he is going to go through their stories, their reasons for convicting, and break them. To prove the kid innocent, he is going to find most of them guilty, prove that they are motivated by prejudice. In turns they will state their case and Fonda will go “Ah, Ha,” and find a flaw or contradiction in their thinking.
The love for this film is based I think on two things. Firstly, people always feel rather proud of themselves when they can sit though something challenging, like an hour and half drama set in one room, and be entertained by it. Secondly, it shows them the system, the democratic system not just the jury system, though challenging, works. But it doesn't. What it demonstrates is the frightening power of peer pressure. Fonda initially refuses to convict not because he doesn't believe the boy is guilty but because he is inhibited by the responsibility of handing down the death sentence. (If nothing else, it is the most effective anti-capital punishment drama ever.) Bravely he stands alone, one man facing down eleven, thus persuading another juror to come round to his side because he admires the nobility of his actions. Once he starts to winkle round one or two others, who possibly have been looking for reasons to find the young disadvantaged Hispanic kid innocent or have been angered by the bullish attitudes of the Guilty voters, the rest fall like cards.
The film cheats in a couple of ways. It isn't just twelve men in a room. At the beginning we see the end of the court case: the judge's disinterested summing up, which backs up Fonda's assertion that the handling of the trial and the kid's defence had been substandard. Then, there is a long close up on the defendant’s face as the jurors shuffle out. He looks like he wouldn't hurt a fly, and this image fades out over the jurors moving into the jury room. Fonda's presence inevitably shifts the material. The TV cast were all of equal standing, but in the film Fonda is the star among a cast of (then) unknown. The only other known face was Lee J Cobb, who had been in On The Waterfront. Playing the last angry man to give in he looks and sounds uncannily like Sylvester Stallone and his character's dramatic motivation seems utterly bogus. You can understand the racist (Begley) juror's motivation or the superior stockbroker's motivation (Marshall) but when Fonda gets Cobb to crack because of his ungrateful son it seems cheap and unworthy, a lazy gimmick.
And at the end of the film, they probably let a guilty man go free. You see some of them on the steps outside but you don't see the reaction in court to their not guilty verdict. Far from being a vindication of the legal system, and democracy, it is more of an indictment. Justice is random, pot luck, and more than that there is no objective truth, everything is subjective. Fonda is able to cast doubt over the witness testimony but never effectively addresses the kid's lack of a convincing alibi. A few hours before, eleven of them were completely convinced of his guilt, and even Fonda wasn't sure he was innocent. Their rapid full 180 reversal is a little chilling really. If you want to really push it, you could see the film as evidence of liberalism desire to always push a principle to a point where it becomes debilitating and self destructive.
While watching the film I suddenly had a notion that I had misremembered the film, and that right at the end, once he's won all twelve round, Fonda would flip again, vote guilty and ask the others if - having really, really given the evidence proper scrutiny - they think that the doubt they have is reasonable enough not to convict even though there is still substantial evidence that he did it.
The film doesn't do it, but I will: having tried to persuade you of its flaws, I am now going to flip back and say that though it isn't one of the ten best films ever made, there is something a little bit magnificent about it. When it finishes you really feel you have lived through something. Poignantly a lot of the bigoted and indifferent jurors remain recognisable figures today – one even delivers a variation of Michael Gove had enough of experts quote. Fonda's righteous man in a pale suit though is a forgotten figure from the black and white age.
Extras
Frank Schaffner’s 1955 teleplay of 12 Angry Men, from the series Studio One, featuring an introduction by Ron Simon, curator at the Paley Center for Media
Directed by Sidney Lumet.
Starring Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Jack Klugman, George Voskovec, Robert Webber, Edward Binns and Joseph Sweeney. 96 mins. Black and white. Released on blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection.
It is cinema's greatest courtroom drama, and it doesn't even take place in one. This tale of jury duty is an undoubted classic, a film that has elbowed its way to a position on a plinth just far another above the hurly burly of artistic squabble to be left unpestered. It has two cultural distinctions that drew me to it. One, it is the inspiration for my favourite ever Galton and Simpson line. In their Half Hour parody of the film, Tony Hancock, the chairman of the Jury, makes as impassioned speech to his fellow jurors including the line, “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?”
More intriguing, and mystifying, is its prominence in the top ten of the IMDB list of its top rated movies. As voted for by readers of the Internet Movie Database, it looks incredibly incongruous among all the Godfathers, Star Wars, Lords of the Ring, Nolans, Spielbergs and Taranatinos, wedged in there at number five between The Dark Knight and Schindler's List. Of all those old upstanding 50s black and white dramas, why does this one – rather than, say, On The Waterfront, or High Noon, or Sunset Boulevard – strike such a chord with keyboard warriors who are more used to spending their energies squabbling over Marvel Vs DC, or whether Han shot first? (This, of course, prior to IMDB closing their messageboards.)
I am at a total lose to explain it really. Whatever you make of the films on that list – and I have no idea how Shawshank made it to No 1 – all the films near the top are absolutely pieces of cinema. Twelve Angry Men, is basically a piece of filmed theatre, albeit one that took a few years to migrate to its natural habitat. The original version was done for TV (it is included among the extras here) and was then turned into this film version at the behest of Fonda. Only A few years later, did stage productions start to be put on. Making his big screen debut, 33-year-old Lumet, already an old pro directing for the stage and TV screen, does an excellent job in keeping it tense and tight. There is limited opening up of the material: it starts in the courtroom and ends on the steps outside, but beyond that it's all in the jury room. There's also a heat wave factored in so everybody is sweating profusely (a continuity nightmare) just to ramp up the intensity. Music is used sparingly, but effectively. It's a very fine piece of filmed theatre, but it is filmed theatre.
As the film is 60 years old I'm hoping spoilers aren't an issue but if you haven't seen it, stop now. The story is about Fonda persuading a jury to look more closely at what looks like an open and shut murder case, a young hoodlum who stabs his father to death, and getting them to open their minds to the possibility that there may be some reasonable doubt about the boy's guilt. It is a stage drama and a very traditional form of stage drama, the whodunnit, or in this case a heneverdunnit. Fonda is the maverick detective, our Columbo, our Poirot, and one by one he is going to go through their stories, their reasons for convicting, and break them. To prove the kid innocent, he is going to find most of them guilty, prove that they are motivated by prejudice. In turns they will state their case and Fonda will go “Ah, Ha,” and find a flaw or contradiction in their thinking.
The love for this film is based I think on two things. Firstly, people always feel rather proud of themselves when they can sit though something challenging, like an hour and half drama set in one room, and be entertained by it. Secondly, it shows them the system, the democratic system not just the jury system, though challenging, works. But it doesn't. What it demonstrates is the frightening power of peer pressure. Fonda initially refuses to convict not because he doesn't believe the boy is guilty but because he is inhibited by the responsibility of handing down the death sentence. (If nothing else, it is the most effective anti-capital punishment drama ever.) Bravely he stands alone, one man facing down eleven, thus persuading another juror to come round to his side because he admires the nobility of his actions. Once he starts to winkle round one or two others, who possibly have been looking for reasons to find the young disadvantaged Hispanic kid innocent or have been angered by the bullish attitudes of the Guilty voters, the rest fall like cards.
The film cheats in a couple of ways. It isn't just twelve men in a room. At the beginning we see the end of the court case: the judge's disinterested summing up, which backs up Fonda's assertion that the handling of the trial and the kid's defence had been substandard. Then, there is a long close up on the defendant’s face as the jurors shuffle out. He looks like he wouldn't hurt a fly, and this image fades out over the jurors moving into the jury room. Fonda's presence inevitably shifts the material. The TV cast were all of equal standing, but in the film Fonda is the star among a cast of (then) unknown. The only other known face was Lee J Cobb, who had been in On The Waterfront. Playing the last angry man to give in he looks and sounds uncannily like Sylvester Stallone and his character's dramatic motivation seems utterly bogus. You can understand the racist (Begley) juror's motivation or the superior stockbroker's motivation (Marshall) but when Fonda gets Cobb to crack because of his ungrateful son it seems cheap and unworthy, a lazy gimmick.
And at the end of the film, they probably let a guilty man go free. You see some of them on the steps outside but you don't see the reaction in court to their not guilty verdict. Far from being a vindication of the legal system, and democracy, it is more of an indictment. Justice is random, pot luck, and more than that there is no objective truth, everything is subjective. Fonda is able to cast doubt over the witness testimony but never effectively addresses the kid's lack of a convincing alibi. A few hours before, eleven of them were completely convinced of his guilt, and even Fonda wasn't sure he was innocent. Their rapid full 180 reversal is a little chilling really. If you want to really push it, you could see the film as evidence of liberalism desire to always push a principle to a point where it becomes debilitating and self destructive.
While watching the film I suddenly had a notion that I had misremembered the film, and that right at the end, once he's won all twelve round, Fonda would flip again, vote guilty and ask the others if - having really, really given the evidence proper scrutiny - they think that the doubt they have is reasonable enough not to convict even though there is still substantial evidence that he did it.
The film doesn't do it, but I will: having tried to persuade you of its flaws, I am now going to flip back and say that though it isn't one of the ten best films ever made, there is something a little bit magnificent about it. When it finishes you really feel you have lived through something. Poignantly a lot of the bigoted and indifferent jurors remain recognisable figures today – one even delivers a variation of Michael Gove had enough of experts quote. Fonda's righteous man in a pale suit though is a forgotten figure from the black and white age.
Extras
Frank Schaffner’s 1955 teleplay of 12 Angry Men, from the series Studio One, featuring an introduction by Ron Simon, curator at the Paley Center for Media
- Production history of 12 Angry Men, from teleplay to big-screen classic
- Archival interviews with director Sidney Lumet
- New interview with screenwriter Walter Bernstein about Lumet
- New interview with Simon about writer Reginald Rose
- Tragedy in a Temporary Town (1956), a teleplay directed by Lumet and written by Rose
- New interview with cinematographer John Bailey about director of photography Boris Kaufman
- Original theatrical trailer
- PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by writer and law professor Thane Rosenbaum
