Classics night at Cottage Road cinema is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving! Just as the dust settles on my recent blog about Bad Day at Black Rock, this month’s feature compelled me to write about another classic from the fifties, Sidney Lumet’s legal drama 12 Angry Men (1957). The film was Sidney Lumet’s directorial debut, so not a bad start given that it’s regarded by many as one of the greatest films of all time and that he was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards (he would go on to be nominated for three other films, Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the satirical drama Network (1976) and the legal thriller The Verdict (1982)).
12 Angry Men was adapted from a 1954 teleplay of the same name by Reginald Rose and tells the story of a jury of twelve men as they deliberate over whether the teenager that they have just seen charged with the murder of his father should be convicted or acquitted on the basis of reasonable doubt. As they troop into the jurors’ room it soon becomes clear that they all regard the case as open-and-shut: the accused is clearly guilty. They anticipate a quick unanimous agreement to a ‘guilty’ verdict after which they can return to their lives. However, when they conduct a preliminary tally of the jurors’ positions and the ‘guilty’ votes pile in, they are somewhat irritated to find that the twelfth man, played brilliantly by Henry Fonda, cannot in good conscience vote guilty. What ensues is a tour de force of psychodrama as every man is forced to question his morals, values and assumptions.
Almost the entire film is shot in the jurors’ room in which they are ensconced. It’s a hot summer’s night, the heat is sweat-inducing, the fan isn’t working, and most of the chaps are smoking, and it all adds to the claustrophobic, stifling tension of the scene. Fonda’s character, Juror 8, begins to calmly dismantle the assumptions that his co-jurors have so readily accepted. He outlines alternative feasible scenarios to the ones pressed by the prosecution and remains adamant that reasonable doubt exists. His arguments don’t at first find favour, but gradually, one by one, the other jurors come around to his point of view.
There’s some great acting talent on display here, with terrific performances from Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Lee J Cobb. The dialogue is electric and the cinematography is in the realist style courtesy of Boris Kaufman who had recently won an Academy Award for On The Waterfront. The camera work contributes to the claustrophobia by gradually increasing the focal length as the film progresses, going from above eye-level, wide-angle lens at the beginning to lower angle, telephoto lens close-ups at the end.
Let’s watch juror 3, the hot-tempered and most passionate advocate of a ‘guilty verdict’, played mesmerizingly by Lee J Cobb, as his defiance as last man standing finally crumbles.
