Sidney Lumet (1957)

Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men began life as a teleplay, broadcast in 1954.  Three years later, it became a cinema film – Sidney Lumet’s first – with a screenplay by Rose, who also produced, in partnership with the movie’s star, Henry Fonda.  Photographed in black and white by Boris Kaufman, 12 Angry Men fared poorly at the box office but was critically acclaimed from the word go, and its reputation has grown over the years.   It ranks second in the American Film Institute’s all-time top ten of courtroom dramas.  Nearly the whole film takes place in a single room in a New York courthouse, where an all-male jury considers their verdict at the end of a murder trial.  (If you didn’t know better, you’d think the source material was a stage play, which the piece did become in the 1960s.)  A guilty verdict will mean an automatic death sentence for the trial defendant, a teenager accused of fatally stabbing his father.  The men on whom his life depends are referred to by juror number only, until the very end, when two of the jury, as they leave the courthouse, exchange surnames.

12 Angry Men has a good title and a nifty dramatic structure, both of which are phony.  Far from all the men are angry.   Juror number 1 (Martin Balsam), who’s also the jury foreman, shows remarkable patience throughout – his one outbreak of huffiness lasts about five seconds.  Juror 2 (John Fielder), a meek bank clerk, eventually raises his voice to speak his mind but is never cross.  Juror 12 (Robert Webber), an advertising executive, is too shallow and fickle to be up to anger.  At the start of the jury’s deliberations, only juror 8 (Fonda), an architect, votes not guilty.  He does so, to the exasperation of others, on the grounds of ‘reasonable doubt’.  At first, the outlier’s objections are remarkably woolly.  Can we be 100% sure, he asks; isn’t it possible that witnesses could be wrong?  Rather than telling him he’s confusing reasonable doubt with complete certainty, his fiercest antagonists mostly bluster – so as to contrast their benighted views with his educated liberality.  The structure is phony because the opening vague arguments are just a delaying tactic on Reginald Rose’s part.  In due course, juror 8 refines them into bit-by-bit, forensic dismantling of the prosecution’s evidence.  His increasingly persuasive case doesn’t consist of issues that occur to him during the discussion; rather, he keeps them up his sleeve until the dramatic time is right.  (There’s no disputing his claim that the defence lawyer was negligent in his cross-examination of prosecution witnesses:  it’s incredible that some of the points raised in the jury room weren’t raised in court.)  He wins over one bigot after another until the jury votes unanimously to acquit the defendant.

When he first moves into the main arena, Sidney Lumet shows his talent for building realistic context and claustrophobic atmosphere.  The weather is hot, the window in the airless jury room is jammed, sweat patches soon appear on the shirts of some of the jurors.  It’s not long either, though, before the direction is emphasising significant details in an obvious way.  Juror 3 (Lee J Cobb), who runs some kind of business (and who really is angry), mentions that he has one son, whom he’s not seen for two years, adds with feeling, ‘Kids – you work your heart out …’, and looks furtively at the photograph he takes from his pocket:  Lumet is announcing this is going to matter in a big way.   We wait nearly the whole film for the payoff.  Juror 3 is the last to give in, breaking down as he rages:

‘You lousy bunch of bleeding hearts. You’re not gonna intimidate me. I’m entitled to my opinion. Rotten kids …  You work your life out!  … Not guilty.’

Juror 10 (Ed Begley), a garage owner, is the most aggressively bigoted of the twelve.  Thanks to his racial and social prejudice, he knows what ‘sort of person’ the boy on trial is:  Hispanic and a slum-dweller.  ‘I don’t think the kind of boy he is has anything to do with it,’ counters juror 9 (Joseph Sweeney), an elderly man who’s the first to join juror 8 on the not guilty side.   Yet the kind of boy the defendant is counts for a lot with Lumet.  There’s only a single shot of the teenager in the dock, at the very start, but he (John Savoca) looks pathetically young and innocuous.  His brief appearance is accompanied by a burst of elegiac music that isn’t typical of Kenyon Hopkins’s score.

There are five other jurors not so far mentioned.  Juror 4 (E G Marshall) is a stockbroker, who is super-analytical and has a pair of spectacles to prove it, though they prove his undoing at the business end of the arguments.  Juror 6 (Edward Binns) is a reasonably fair-minded house painter.  Juror 7 (Jack Warden) cares only that a verdict is reached in time for him to get to an evening baseball game.  Numbers 5 and 11 are, in effect, a pair, in that they have common ground with the defendant.  Mild-mannered Juror 5 (Jack Klugman) grew up in a slum.  Juror 11 (George Voskovec who, along with Joseph Sweeney, was the only member of the teleplay cast to reprise his role in the film) is a watchmaker and a European immigrant to America.  Perhaps the sweatiest and certainly the best performance comes from Martin Balsam as the jury foreman, a high-school football coach in the outside world.  Balsam manages to hint at a personality that’s more than the sum of the few characteristics supplied by the script.

Juror 8, needless to say, is not one of the big sweaters – he only glows, although he might as well be wearing shining armour.  Henry Fonda’s outfit is the next best thing:  a suit whiter even than the one Gregory Peck wore five years later in To Kill a Mockingbird (number one in the AFI’s courtroom dramas top ten).  I’d watched 12 Angry Men twice before, decades ago; this viewing, on television, came the day after seeing The Miseducation of Cameron Post.    It made me feel I’d been unfair in implying that Chloë Grace Moretz, in playing a role to promote a worthy cause, was doing something distinctively de nos jours.  Henry Fonda, while demonstrating far superior acting skills, was essentially doing the same thing here, sixty years earlier.  The film has been widely admired as a ringing endorsement of the American justice system and it seems beyond reasonable doubt that it has affected many people deeply.  I find it cannily entertaining but schematic and manipulative to a vexing degree.   To say it made me angry would be an overstatement but I did feel increasingly embarrassed by the mechanics.  When Lee J Cobb eventually succumbs and buries his face in shame, I too wanted to cover my eyes.  The main consolation of revisiting 12 Angry Men comes in its reminder that Sidney Lumet went on to make Dog Day Afternoon – a much superior film in which a group of New Yorkers are stuck and swelter indoors as the result of a crime.

12 September 2018