Customer Reviews

12 Angry Men (Widescreen)

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12 Angry Men (1957)
Drama, 96 minutes
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Starring Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and Martin Balsam

Sidney Lumet passed away in 2011, but he left us with 72 films, shorts or TV series. This was his first feature for the big screen and it's definitely among his best work.

For me, one of the signs of a good film is to take a subject in which I have no interest and hold my attention for the duration. The story takes place in one room, apart from a couple of minutes at the beginning and end of the film. It succeeds because of the strength of the dialogue and the acting ability of all involved.

After a very compact 96 minutes in which no scene is wasted, the credits roll. I'm left with the feeling that I have just seen something important. The film deals with racism and highlights the good and bad points of the American justice system. Henry Fonda leads a strong cast and every member has a significant role to play.

Lumet used a variety of camera angles to make the viewer feel like a member of the jury and it's easy to be drawn in. This is one of those rare stories where dialogue is actually exciting. It's really something that has the potential to be enjoyed by any audience.

Criterion's recent Blu-ray release offers a wonderful presentation and includes a good supplemental package.

An excellent classic movie. Seen it several times and now own it. Great film and bought it on the strength of demonstrating persuasive talking to my wife who is a teacher. Thought it may be useful for her students. Simple set, all done in one room and no names of characters are ever mentioned until the end. One bum note - there seemed to be a fault on my disc at chapter 19 so ended up skipping a couple of scenes. Worth watching.

The all star cast of this original movie version does the subject justice. It has compassion, anger, despair, hope and empathy in abundance.

This is a courtroom drama with a difference. Apart from a very brief scene in the courtroom itself, the film takes place in the jury's deliberation room. The whole film revolves around the deliberations of a jury in a murder case in which a guilty verdict will lead to the death penalty for the accused. Initially it all seems very clear-cut with an all male jury having decided on a the young mans guilt before they have even sat down, all that is except for one man (Henry Fonda). Although he believes the accused may have possibly committed the murder, his values and ethics won't allow him to agree with his fellow jurors without thrashing out all of the evidence. Gradually he forces the other men to confront the evidence in front of them and to admit the situation is not as clear cut as it seemed. At the same time they are brought face to face with their own prejudices.

Filmed in black and white and shot almost entirely in one room, this film allows the viewer to concentrate entirely on the dialogue with nothing to distract from the story. It is a credit to the acting skills of the cast and to the direction of Sidney Lument (in his directorial debut) that the film remains gripping throughout. This is drama at its best and still one of the finest, if not the finest, courtroom dramas to be found.

What can I possibly say about this masterpiece? It is surely one of the greatest movies, a work full of layers of meaning, of symbolism, of psychological and artistic subtleties. You can wach this movie an infinite number of times, because each time you discover something new. I would just like to bring up one often neglected point. For me, this movie shows the shift in acting styles after World War II - a shift towards more naturalistic approach close to "method" acting. Many of the younger members of the cast - such as Martin Balsam and Jack Klugman - seem to belong to this new school. Just watch such things as Klugman's slow reaction when it dawns on him that Cobb is yelling at him, or the foreman (Balsam) as he "gives up" and sulks in the corner. The movie is full of wonderful and telling details such as these. I also think that the style of this film bears some relation to Italian Neo-Realism of the 40's and 50's (eg. stark setting, realistic dialogue, and filming in "real time", including seemingly mundane actions). And has anybody noticed that this movie obeys the "unities" of classical Greek drama (of time, place, etc.)?

And to those cynics who think that this is a movie about a clever man who manages to convince eleven men that a guilty youth is innocent - think again. I have actually lain awake at night worrying that the young man probably is, after all, guilty! But for the purpose of the film it doesn't matter. This is not a whodunnit; it is about human character and human behavior, the law, how our backgrounds color our attitudes, and countless other themes. And of course it is a showcase for twelve SUPERB actors.

(But please, who wrote the text on the back of the video cover? "Eleven jurors are convinced that the defendant is guilty of murder. The twelfth has no doubt of his innocence." WHAT?!! Did this person even watch the movie?!)

It always pisses me off when people give The Matrix as a philosophical movie, when there are so many much more rich sources of artistic exploration. 12 Angry Men is one such example, a great movie about epistemology.

During an unseen trial, a young man of a negatively-seen ethnicity (which is never specified) is accused of the murder of his father. It is an "open and shut case", and all the jurors agree that he is guilty, except juror #8, played by Henry Fonda.

In 95 minutes, almost shot in real-time, we observe as the jurors' prejudices and emotions churn and crash in mighty waves, as each piece of evidence is examined and examined again, as every actor plays against the others. In the process, we witness an object-lesson in epistemology : what is doubt, what is evidence, how do we prove or disprove a proposition, and how people in groups act in group dynamics that sometimes are not conductive to the truth.

Politically speaking, 12 Angry Men is a testimony against juries and capital punishment, but that is not the point of the movie. It is a movie about how we judge events and how we filter the truth. And that's something that you won't get from any action movie.

Excellent movie that I think we can all agree could not be made today. There probably isn't too much I could add that hasn't already been said, but I wanted to clarify two common misconceptions regarding this movie.

Beyond all the many themes pertaining to prejudice and our criminal justice system that this movie touches upon, it is a classic study in group psychology. Something I've noticed in the different summaries of this movie is the assumption that, initially, 11 jurors automatically assumed the defendent's guilt, and voted accordingly at the beginning of the movie. This is not altogether true. If you watch closely when the initial vote is taken, 4 of the characters (the timid banker, the old man, the immigrant, and the young man originally from the slums), hesitate to raise their hands to vote guilty. They slowly start to raise theirs hands only after they look around and see their neighbors shoot their hands up quickly. This illustrates a common phenomenon of group psychology wherein many people feel the pressure to simply go with the flow without thinking, so as not to march out of line with the pack (kind of like the initial overwhelming support of the Iraq war once the war drums started beating). The Henry Fonda charater understood this. His understanding was the reason behind his crucial gamble to vote guilty along with the others, only after a second vote was taken by secret ballot.

The other misconception is the assumption by many reviewers of this film that the young man who is the defendant is Puerto Rican. At no poing in the movie is the actual specific ethnicity of the defendant referred to. The one brief shot of the defendant at the beginning of the film reveals a young man who might have been Hispanic, Italian, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, etc. The vagueness of his actual ethnic background was done on purpose so that the larger message of general blind prejudice and its potential dangers was not obscured by any particular manifestation of prejudice against any given group.

All in all, an amazing movie and display of superb acting. Incidentally, I agree with a couple reviewers that Lee J. Cobb absolutely stole the show in the last few minutes of the movie. Powerful acting at its best!

It always pisses me off when people give The Matrix as a philosophical movie, when there are so many much more rich sources of artistic exploration. 12 Angry Men is one such example, a great movie about epistemology.

During an unseen trial, a young man of a negatively-seen ethnicity (which is never specified) is accused of the murder of his father. It is an "open and shut case", and all the jurors agree that he is guilty, except juror #8, played by Henry Fonda.

In 95 minutes, almost shot in real-time, we observe as the jurors' prejudices and emotions churn and crash in mighty waves, as each piece of evidence is examined and examined again, as every actor plays against the others. In the process, we witness an object-lesson in epistemology : what is doubt, what is evidence, how do we prove or disprove a proposition, and how people in groups act in group dynamics that sometimes are not conductive to the truth.

Politically speaking, 12 Angry Men is a testimony against juries and capital punishment, but that is not the point of the movie. It is a movie about how we judge events and how we filter the truth. And that's something that you won't get from any action movie.

'12 Angry Men' is a fantastic film by one of the most underrated directors ever; Sidney Lumet. It about 12 jurors trying to figure out a complicated crime. Along the way, they discover a lot about each other and about human psychology.

That movie is the best, for your personal and professional life. Every body should own one... Negotiation, bargaining, integrative, distributive, a little bit of shouting... that is what you need to help you understand others...

You should have this movie...