12 Angry Men

Sidney Lumet’s feature debut is a splendidly written, radically effective courtroom thriller that rightfully stands as a modern classic. 12 Angry Men is a spellbinding, incisive and engrossing assessment of a miscellaneous group of twelve male jurors who are unnervingly brought together after hearing the facts in an outwardly open-and-shut murder trial case. The film is a powerful denunciation, denigration and expose of the trial by jury system.

The undeniable, confrontational film examines the twelve men's deep-seated personal prejudices, perceptual biases and weaknesses, apathy, anger, personalities, defective judgments, cultural differences, unawareness and fears, that threaten to contaminate their decision-making abilities, cause them to disregard the real issues in the case, and potentially lead them to a miscarriage of justice.

The film has no flashbacks, narration, or subtitles. The camera is basically locked in the enclosed room with the deliberating jurors for 90 of the film's 95 minutes, and the film is fundamentally shot in real-time in an authentic jury room. The film opens with the camera looking up at the magnificent pillars of justice outside Manhattan's Court of General Sessions on a summer afternoon. The subjective camera strolls about inside the marbled interior rotunda and hallways, and on the second floor chaotically makes its way into a double-doored room marked 228. There, a bored-sounding, evasive judge jadedly instructs the twelve-man jury to begin their deliberations after listening to six days of a long and complex case of murder in the first degree.

The tense script presents each juror vibrantly using detailed soliloquies, all which are skillfully performed by the film's unblemished cast. Still, it's Lumet's claustrophobic direction, all perspiring close-ups and confined compositions within a one-room setting that really transforms this artificial story into an explosive and convincing nail-biter.