Stars: Henry Fonda (Juror # 8 - "Davis"), Joseph Sweeney (Juror # 9 - "McArdle"), Martin Balsam (Juror #1), John Fiedler (Juror #2 ), Lee J. Cobb (Juror #3), E. G. Marshall (Juror # 4), Jack Klugman (Juror # 5), Edward Binns (Juror # 6), Jack Warden (Juror # 7), Ed Begley (Juror # 10), George Voskovec (Juror # 11), Robert Webber (Juror # 12)
Director: Sidney Lumet
Awards / Honors
- 3 Oscar Nominations - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing (Adpated Screenplay)
- #88 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills list (2001)
- #28 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villians list - Juror #8, Hero (2003)
- #42 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers list (2006)
- #87 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list (2007)
- # 2 on AFI's 10 Top 10 List - Courtroom Drama (2008)
- In 2007, 12 Angry Men was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Genre: Courtroom Drama
Running Time: 1 Hour, 36 minutes
Format: DVD (not yet available on Blu-ray)
Odyssey Rating: 4 1/2 Stars (John - 5 Stars, Beth - 4 Stars)
John's Take
12 Angry Men may in fact be the first “grown-up” drama movie I ever watched. I was probably around 10 or 11 when I first saw it on television at my grandparent’s house. Don’t misunderstand; I certainly wasn’t a sophisticated child. If a show wasn’t animated, or if it didn’t have a laugh-track you probably couldn’t get me to watch it. Despite lacking both of these elements, there were two reasons why I ended up watching the film anyway. The first reason was because I recognized Jack Klugman from re-runs of The Odd Couple, so I assumed he was going do something funny at some point. The second reason was because there was literally nothing else to do.
For those of you under the age of 40, you have to keep in mind that at the time there was no such thing as DirectTV, iPods, the Internet, Nintendo DSs, or DVDs. Heck at that time Cable TV was a new concept, the Atari 2600 was technological breakthrough, Sony hadn’t introduced the Walkman yet, and only the very well-to-do had a VCR. Even if you did have a VCR, you were still limited in what you could watch since the concept of ‘movie rentals’ was still about 5 to 8 years away. My grandparents lived on a dairy farm in northeastern Illinois, maybe an hour or two from both the Iowa and Wisconsin borders. In other words, they lived in the middle of nowhere and from such a location, it was possible to receive only five, that’s correct, only five channels on my grandparent’s television – 1 ABC station, 2 CBS stations, and 2 NBC stations. All six stations came out of either Rockford, IL or Madison WI.
As “unplugged” as that sounds by today’s standards, and quite frankly even by the standards of my childhood, just fifteen years earlier, the “multi-media set-up” that my grandparent’s had was probably the envy of the county. They had this extra tall antenna on the side of the house and it had a motorized aerial on top. You could control the direction the aerial was pointing by turning this large dial that sat on top of my grandparents TV. The outside ring of the dial had a mark on it and the interior part of the dial had a matching mark. You would turn the outside ring, and the center of the dial would slowly turn while making a sound similar to that of a small electric motor makes being just slightly overworked until both the red marks had re-aligned. So, if you wanted to watch the stations coming out of Rockford, you would turn the dial to the east and the aerial would turn to the east allowing those stations to come in more clearly. If you wanted to watch the stations coming out of Madison you turned the dial to a more northerly direction. On a really clear day, you might get lucky and be able to pick up a station out of Dubuque, IA if you turned the dial to a more westerly heading. Needless to say this made channel flipping a little problematic. You would have to manually turn the channel – no remote control – through the Rockford channels, with the requisite static showing up on screen as you moved through the channels with no signal. You then had to stand up, change move the big aerial dial on the top of the TV, and then flip though the dial again to see what was on the Madison channels. That much exertion might just kill me nowadays. Even as primitive as all of that sounds, I still remember my grandparents neighbors coming over and commenting how great it must be to get so many television channels.
Thus, it probably would come as no surprise that despite the large number of fond memories I have about my grandparent’s farm, very few of those memories involve television. In fact, I only have five of them. They are:
1. Watching Lawrence Welk on Sunday nights2. Watching Hee-Haw on Sunday nights immediately following Lawrence Welk3. Watching The Carol Burnett Show.4. Watching the original series of Star Trek for the first time (The Devil in the Dark was the episode in case you wanted to know)5. Watching 12 Angry Men for the first time.
The first 3 memories are due to the near fanatical devotion that my grandparent’s had to those three shows – woe to the grandchild that suggested watching something else! The last two are due largely to the fact that it was a hassle to keep changing the channel.
So, on a rainy summer afternoon, facing the prospect of having to choose between messing with the aerial / changing the channel or turning off the TV and having nothing to do at all, I elected to take a risk on this old black-and-white movie and hope that Jack Klugman did something Oscar Madison-like. At the time, black-and-white programming was a hit-or-miss proposition in my book. Sometimes it was good (such as The Lone Ranger or Abbott and Costello movies) and sometimes it wasn’t (say something like A Place in the Sun). But since my mind at the time operated on the concept that nurses were always nurses, firemen always were firemen, and actors known for a comedic role always played comedic roles, I was fairly certain that something funny would happen if I just sat their long enough.
Needless to say, nothing funny happen. Yet, for some reason, I remained transfixed on the movie. I suspect it was how the movie keeps re-explaining and re-examining each little detail of the case; it made it easy for me to follow the story. By the time the movie was over, and considering my exposure to suspense drama was, up to that point, limited to Scooby-Doo, it shouldn’t be a shock to you all that I believed I had just witnessed the most brilliant movie ever produced! I actually felt smarter, as if I was now prepared to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. Henry Fonda (although at the time I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what his name was and for a few more years Mr. Fonda would be referred to simply as The-Guy-From-12-Angry-Men) had just taught me everything I needed to know about the American justice system. I wanted to show off my new found knowledge. Neither my grandparents nor my mother was overly impressed. A simple, “That’s nice dear”, was about the best response that information concerning the miracle that is the trial-by-jury system could muster. Apparently, they hadn’t seen the movie. If they had, they would be just as impressive and worldly as I now was…
And that ladies and gentlemen, is the secret magic benefit of watching this movie. There will be times in your life – usually at a dinner / cocktail party or business-related function – you will find yourself being forced to make conversation with one or more people that are trying really hard to show off how cultured and sophisticated they are. They aren’t of course, because actual cultured and intellectual people usually don’t feel the need to prove that to anyone, but rarely are you free to point that out because it isn’t nice to tell your spouse’s co-workers or supervisor that they are pompous windbags. Fortunately for you, the members of the pseudo-intellectual set all love 12 Angry Men. It is to them what Network is to Glenn Beck and his fans – which, oddly enough was also directed by Sidney Lumet. Have these people seen 12 Angry Men? Not usually, but they have all heard of it. If you can manage to work 12 Angry Men into the conversation, the people you are talking to will start to gush over you thinking they have discovered a kindred spirit. Their gushing gives them the opportunity to take back control of the conversation and allows you to continue to stand quietly and enjoy cocktail while you pretend to listen.
Of course, you always run the risk that the person you are talking to has actually seen the film. So, if you want to use 12 Angry Men as part of your arsenal of small-talk weaponry, you should actually sit down and watch it yourself. Luckily for you, that is a good thing. The story is a little simplistic (remember a 10-11 year-old version of me could follow it), but otherwise the film is outstanding. I could drone on about the acting and cinematography, but since we are not at a cocktail party, suffice it to say that that after 30+ years and countless numbers of viewings, the film is still one of my favorite movies of all time. I may not think it is as brilliant as I did as a child, but 12 Angry Men still warrants a rating of 5 Stars.
John
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