Twelve Angry Men

In The Wayward Bus Steinbeck caught a group of assorted characters in a close and unavoidable situation, sealed them off from their daily lives and examined them. He brought out their responsibilities by a kind of dialectic in friction, playing one person against another.

In Twelve Angry Men the vehicle is changed from a cross-country bus to a court of law, but the idea is similar. An adolescent from the slums is charged with murdering his father: all the evidence is against him, and there has been a strong prosecution and a weak defense. When the stage is set around the jury-room table, an immediate vote shows eleven for Guilty and one for Not Guilty. The dissenter, Henry Fonda, begins a long haul against the prejudices, inhibitions and smug certainty of the other jurors to bring out the actualities of the murder night. In doing so, the inner actualities of his fellow citizens are laid bare.

The men are conspicuously variant and characterized into types, which is all right, since, looking through such clear-cut personalities, it is easier to see what is common in all the men. There is a young, natty, Madison Avenue type, a European watchmaker, a paper-hanger, a football coach, a bank teller, a salesman, and a man himself born and raised in the slums.

Of the five principals, Lee J. Cobb is a self-made man from the lower East Side with a neurotic desire to see the boy convicted because of his own son's ingratitude, and Ed Begley plays a bigoted garage owner, his vote founded on an unfounded distinction between himself and his slum clientele. Jack Warner is a cold and prim broker, a man used to having his opinions deferred to, and E. G. Marshall, as the quick-minded old widower, is the only man to give credence to the young architect Fonda's "reasonable doubt" at first.

All the characterizations are handled extremely well--easily identifiable types with enough individuality to be convincing. Cobb perhaps is a little too obvious about his character's psychological condition, especially when he destroys his son's photograph in a moment of aberration, but Begley and Warner are especially good. Fonda himself has a role much more difficult than any other: the attitudes and attentions of all the jurors center on him, and he must handle each in a different way. His involvement is complicated by his own uncertainty about the boy's innocence. He fights his verbal and psychological battles with great power and agility: his naturalness of speech and gesture are mixed with a certain resigned sadness in his eyes, reminiscent of his performances in The Petrified Forest, which make his performance faultless. He deposes the small-minded, big-mouthed garageman, leads the brawny, embittered father into an emotional trap, and shatters the broker's cocksureness with consummate skill. It is an award-winning performance.

Twelve Angry Men is primarily a dramatic case-study of the interactions in a group of men making a grave decision; the subtlety of contact and influence back and forth among them, the actions proceeding out of their affected personalities despite themselves, make the film fascinating to watch. The lever on which the study is poised happens to be Justice, and there are a few soggy lines about how wonderful it is to have juries, but the errant enjoyed simply on the merits of the actors and their direction.

The photographic and technical effects are good, being unobtrusive; there is some very good close-up work in the tenser moments.

The co-feature is a tired little picture concerned with another kind of justice, the Western from-the-hip variety.