When Henry Fonda hired
Sidney Lumet to helm the 1957 big-screen adaptation of Reginald Rose's teleplay 12 Angry Men,
the 32-year-old TV director was asked to bring visual panache and
verisimilitude to a story that takes place in one jury deliberation room, in
real time. So Lumet developed the style he would later become known for:
emphasizing faces and places. The movie opens with an artfully choreographed
six-minute tracking shot, casually introducing 12 men tasked with deciding the
fate of a Puerto Rican teenager accused of murdering his father. After that
shot, Lumet uses camera movement sparingly, mainly relying on a series of
close-ups and medium shots to document the parameters of a dingy, cramped,
oppressively hot space, and observing how that environment affects 12 men from
different social backgrounds.
Fonda plays the lone "not
guilty" holdout when deliberations begin, and for the next 90 minutes, he wears
down the resistance of the others, played by such commanding figures of the New
York stage as E.G. Marshall, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, Jack Klugman, and Martin
Balsam. Rose's script builds in surprises, heated speeches, and artificial
pauses for the sake of varying up the rhythm. Some of the bits of
business—like the way the jurors watch each other before they decide how
to vote—are well-observed examples of honest human behavior. Others—like
the way each man's personal history has a bearing on their opinion—feel
more contrived.
But then, good theater
often abstracts reality to serve a higher truth. 12 Angry Men is a study of how
ordinary men take their jury duty as an opportunity to vent about the injustice
they see around them every day. The facts of the case mean what they need them to mean, whether
it's that all immigrants are liars, or that the younger generation lacks the
proper respect, or even that the American legal system is inept. Though the
jury in 12 Angry Men reaches a verdict, neither Rose nor Lumet definitively state
whether they're "right." The point—as Lumet well knows—is that when
it comes to making sense of a picture, a lot depends on the framing.
Key features: Two highly informative featurettes, plus a
fact-filled commentary track by USC professor Drew Caspar.