Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957)
The premise of 12 Angry Men is as simple as it sounds; a dozen middle-aged, testy men (all white) are the jurors tasked with determining the fate of a young man tried for the murder of his father. With the exception of very brief opening and closing sequences, the film takes place entirely in the confines of a stuffy room. It’s the hottest day of summer and although eleven of the group are certain that the boy is guilty, one (played by Hollywood star Henry Fonda who also produced) speculates that he might not be. The next hour and a half then follows the fierce, almost real-time debate amongst a group of strangers, each carrying their own biases and preconceptions.
This is Sidney Lumet’s film debut; he was already a TV and theatre director, but this was the start of an illustrious career as a Hollywood mainstay. 12 Angry Men was not his brainchild though, originating from a script by Reginald Rose which was originally performed live on TV (a teleplay) in 1954 for CBS’s anthology series “Studio One”. After it received several Emmys, Rose adapted it for the silver screen, and who could be a more fitting director than Lumet, understanding its history as a hybrid of television and theatre. One of 12 Angry Men’s most frequent praises is it’s lack of showiness, which for me was a lack of cinematic-ness. With a steady pace, single room setting, stagey blocking and tight focus on character, it has the effect of being a recorded play rather than a film adapted from one.
The theatricality was a problem for me; I couldn’t quite understand why it was made as a movie, and regarded as one of the best at that. The narrative functions wonderfully, and there is a tension in seeing each man get won over bit by bit, but without strong cinematic choices in music (which there is none) or cinematography, the simplicity made me think of a study text for a high-school English assignment.
There were some moments that impacted me via filmmaking; the one shot of the accused front-on to the camera before fading into the deliberation room, or a tense scene where a juror mimics stabbing another juror with the murder weapon. It’s also not without metaphor - the room is hot because the deliberation is a pressure cooker, the broken fan speaks to a broken system, we never actually know the truth of the case - but the clear themes of ambiguity and justice were easy to terse out. By and large, I felt that almost every component would work just as successfully as a piece of text, if not a stage production, rather than moving image.
There had to be something I was missing considering how beloved the film is. Turns out, my sense of 12 Angry Men failing in style was wrong on three counts. The first is that Lumet has been praised across his career for an un-showy approach to film-making. There was a subtle use of the frame closing in with each sequence, subtle enough that I didn’t notice, where different lenses bring the men tighter together the more heated they became. Within that is the second point; that Lumet’s strongest focus is on actors, a component I’m probably most disconnected with as a viewer. It’s part of why I’m resistant to theatre because I’m excited by the expansive spectacle of the screen as opposed to intimacy with another person.
Thirdly, I took for granted aesthetic choices that I assumed to be part and parcel of the time it was made; particularly the gritty black-and-white used to set the tone, which was a bold choice for a world newly enticed into the vibrant candy of technicolour. It’s fitting that 12 Angry Men’s cinematographer, Boris Kaufman, made several other films with Lumet and also worked on Elia Kazan’s austere classic, On The Waterfront (1954), which I also failed to connect with.
It feels worth noting that 12 Angry Men’s racial politics are relatively in-line with today, shocking considering that segregation wasn’t outlawed in America until 1964. One juror’s racist rant, which sounds eerily similar to todays right wing, is deemed as deplorable by every other member of the group. Fonda’s character even makes pains to elaborate how the accused boy (who is not white and lives in “the slums”) is trapped in a system that sets kids like him up to fail.
In regards to gender, only one juror is particularly hyper-masculine, but the film is no less permeated by a stoic maleness. I couldn’t help but think of director Douglas Sirk, known for texturally lush and colourfully vivid melodramas, which were most popular during the 50s though dismissed as “women’s films”. Taking his Imitation of Life (1959) as an example, both it and 12 Angry Men come out in the later half of this decade, examining the injustices faced by people of colour in a society dictated by white bias, yet Sirk’s focus on domestic female perspectives with gorgeous visual flourishes (functioning as a conscious comment on class) were seen as too flashy to be serious. Lumet’s drab and pinpointed approach was what (male) critics of the time took as the real deal.
As Roger Ebert reflected in 2002, “[12 Angry Men] is a masterpiece of stylized realism--the style coming in the way the photography and editing comment on the bare bones of the content.” Realism isn’t a mode I particularly respond to, I have a distance and a preference that doesn’t respond strongly to this type of cinema. Even with my misalignment, it’s the hard-nose approach of films like this that was totally refreshing to 50s Hollywood, paving a raw style that influences a vastness of excellent, open-ended, serious and restrained films through to the present. I may be guilty of not loving it, but the case is already made for 12 Angry Men.
12 Angry Men is available to stream online via Stan.
Next Sunday - Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), which is available to stream online via Netflix.