12 Angry Men
Short description
Twelve jurors retire to a cramped, sweltering room to reach a verdict in a murder trial. A teenage boy from a poor background stands accused of killing his father, and a guilty verdict would send him to the electric chair. The decision must be unanimous, and at the first vote eleven men agree the case is clear. One juror refuses to go along, not because he believes the boy innocent, but because he thinks a life deserves an hour of discussion. What follows is a struggle over the evidence and over the prejudices each man brought into the room, as the single holdout argues his case and the others begin to examine what they actually know.
Sidney Lumet directed, working from Reginald Rose's screenplay, with Henry Fonda and Rose producing. This was Lumet's first feature film, the opening entry in a directing career that would run to 26 films, followed by Fail Safe in 1964. The credited cast of twenty is led by Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman and Edward Binns, and the action stays almost entirely inside the jury room.
The film holds a 9/10 rating on IMDb across roughly 977,000 votes and 8.6/10 on TMDB from a much smaller base of about 10,000. A critics' rating of 9.4/10 from 63 reviews places it slightly above even the audience scores, which is unusual for a drama of this age and suggests the film's reputation has held steady rather than faded.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film did not perform well at the box office, and Henry Fonda did not receive the promised fee for it, but he still considered "Twelve Angry Men" one of his three best films, alongside the dramatic road movie "The Grapes of Wrath" (John Ford, 1940) and the Western "The Ox-Bow Incident" (William A. Wellman, 1942).
- When the jurors try to determine how many seconds it would have taken the old man to reach the door, Juror No. 2 states that Juror No. 8 reached it in 40 seconds. In reality, 30 seconds had passed.
- The teenager suspect's ethnicity was not specified intentionally. The filmmakers wanted to show only that he was not of European descent, and that the bias (and lack thereof) of some jurors was a significant part of the entire process.
- At the beginning of the film, all cameras are positioned above eye level, and wide-angle lenses are used during filming to visually increase the distance between the characters. As the plot develops, the cameras are lowered to eye level during filming. By the end of the film, almost all filming is done with cameras positioned below eye level, and sometimes close-ups are used with telephoto lenses to enhance the feeling of claustrophobia.
- Producer Henry Fonda (1905-1982) chose Lumet as the director because he already had experience working in television, and because he always met deadlines and stayed within budget.
- Rehearsals took 2 weeks, so the entire filming process had to be completed in 21 days.
- Director Sidney Lumet (1924-2012) kept the actors in a room for several hours, made them learn their lines, but didn't start filming; he wanted them to understand what it was like to spend a long time in a room with the same people.
- Due to budget constraints, the lighting was set up in such a way that filming could only be done from one specific angle, so all scenes from that angle had to be filmed in one go. Therefore, scenes of conversations where characters are shown to the viewer from different angles had to be filmed not simultaneously, but in several takes, with a time difference of up to several days. Moreover, the actors were often filmed completely alone, after which other characters were added to the frame during editing.
- Henry Fonda disliked watching himself on screen, so he didn’t stay until the end of the screening room showing of the film. Before leaving, he quietly whispered to the director: “Sidney, it’s magnificent.”
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