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.