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Group Dynamics

[pic]12 Angry Men (1957) is the gripping, penetrating, and engrossing examination of a diverse group of twelve jurors (all male, mostly middle-aged, white, and generally of middle-class status) who are uncomfortably brought together to deliberate after hearing the 'facts' in a seemingly open-and-shut murder trial case. They retire to a jury room to do their civic duty and serve up a just verdict for the indigent minority defendant (with a criminal record) whose life is in the balance. The film is a powerful indictment, denouncement and expose of the trial by jury system. The frightened, teenaged defendant is on trial, as well as the jury and the American judicial system with its purported sense of infallibility, fairness and lack of bias. Alternatively, the film could also be viewed as commentary on McCarthyism, Fascism, or Communism (threatening forces in the 50s). One of the film's posters described how the workings of the judicial process can be disastrous: "LIFE IS IN THEIR HANDS - DEATH IS ON THEIR MINDS! It EXPLODES Like 12 Sticks of Dynamite."
This was television-trained director Sidney Lumet's first feature film - a low-budget ($350,000) film shot in only 17 days from a screenplay by Reginald Rose, who based his script on his own teleplay of the same name. After the initial airing of the TV play in early 1954 on Studio One CBS-TV, co-producer/star Henry Fonda asked Rose in 1956 if the teleplay could be expanded to feature-film length (similar to what occurred to Paddy Chayefsky's TV play Marty (1955)), and they became co-producers for the project (Fonda's sole instance of film production).
The jury of twelve 'angry men,' entrusted with the power to send an uneducated, teenaged Puerto Rican, tenement-dwelling boy to the electric chair for killing his father with a switchblade knife, are literally locked into a small, claustrophobic rectangular jury room on a stifling hot summer day until they come up with a unanimous decision - either guilty or...