Movie poster for The Twelve Angry Men
From the perspective of film form, "Twelve Angry Men" is a court film. In terms of intent, it is a crash course on the interpretation of the provisions of the U.S. Constitution that allow for a fair trial and the presumption of innocence of defendants. It's unpretentious: with the exception of a succinct opening and a more succinct ending, the entire film takes place in a small jury room on New York's "Hottest Day of the Year." Twelve men debate the fate of a young defendant accused of murdering his father. The film never again features any trial process except for the judge's perfunctory, almost weary shift of responsibility to the jury members. The judge's tone implied that it was a foregone conclusion by the jury. We heard neither the voices of the plaintiffs nor the opinions of defence counsel. We only get some second-hand evidence while the jurors are debating. Most court dramas end with a clear verdict, but "Twelve Angry Men" does not tell us until the end whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It's a story about whether the jury's suspicions about justice for his charges are justified.
The doubt of fairness is judged by the belief that the defendant is innocent unless there is a crime that can be proved. This is one of the most enlightened elements of our nation's constitution. Although, many Americans have a certain degree of difficulty in accepting this. "It's a case that's clear at a glance," the jury members snapped as they assembled in their claustrophobic cabin. At the end of the first vote, the other ten jurors agreed with him, with only one opposing one— Jury Eight (Henry Fonda).
The tension in the film stems from character conflicts, dialogue arguments, and body language, rather than character movements. We only caught a glimpse of the defendant in a brief single shot. Logic, emotion, and prejudice are pitted against each other in an attempt to gain the upper hand. It's a masterpiece of genre realist cinema – avoiding as much subjective judgment as possible on the basic facts of the story by photography and editing. Released in 1957, when the concept of color film and extravagant production was rife, Twelve Angry Men appeared concise and less friendly to the audience. It fascinated critics at Life magazine and spread widely, but it was disappointing at the box office. Yet decades have passed, and it has a strong supporter and was ranked twenty-third for the best film in film history in a 2002 poll in the Internet Movie Database.
The story is based on a tv script by Reginald Ross, which was brought to the screen by Sidney Lumet. Rose and Henry Fonda worked as co-producers, and the two also raised money for the film out of their own pockets. Despite Lumet's extensive experience in the field of television drama, this was his first feature film. The film was shot by veteran cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who is credited with having a technique that enhances the tension of dialogue. There was only one Fanta grossing star on the cast, but the other eleven were also the best actors to work in New York at the time, including Martin Balsam, Lee Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Ed Begley and Robert Webber. They swallow clouds and spit fog, they sweat, they curse, they stretch their limbs, they pace back and forth, they jump like thunder.
In a film of just ninety-five minutes, jurors are portrayed in sharp lines because of their personalities, backgrounds, careers, prejudices, and emotional tendencies. They debated the evidence so thoroughly that we felt we knew as much as the jurors, especially the old man who said he heard the murder and saw the defendant flee, and the woman who said she saw the incident passing through the window of a moving elevated train. We saw the murder weapon— a small spring-loaded folding knife— and heard jurors arguing about the angle of the knife wound. We see Fonda mimicking the trembling footsteps of the stroke old man to see if he can get to the door in time to see the murderer's escape. In pitting two seemingly contradictory pieces of evidence against each other, Twelve Angry Men is as ingenious as an Agatha Christie suspense novel that reveals the debate before suspense.
But it's not a film about solving a crime. It is about a young man who is sent to the death table. The film duly focuses on some recent new findings: many death sentences are based on contaminated evidence. "We're talking about someone's life here," said fonda, "and we can't make a decision in five minutes." What if we are wrong? ”
The defendant we glimpsed looked like a "minority" but couldn't tell which ethnic group he belonged to. He could be Italian, Turk, Indian, Jewish, Arab, or Mexican. His eyes were surrounded by dark circles, and he looked exhausted and panicked. In the jury room, some jurors implicitly refer to "such people." Finally, Juror Number Ten (Ed Begley) begins a racist rant: "You know how these kinds of people lie. This is their innate habit. They don't know what the facts are. Listen to me, they don't need much of a reason to kill people at all. He continued, and the jurors got up from their jurors' chairs one by one, then walked away and turned their backs. Even those who believe the defendants are guilty cannot sit in their chairs and continue to listen to Begley's words of racial prejudice. This is one of the most powerful scenes in the whole movie.
The eleven-on-one vote at the beginning slowly changed. Although the film clearly takes Fonda's side, not all of those who vote for "guilt" are portrayed negatively. One of the protagonists, Juror Number Four (E.G. Marshall), is a stockbroker with rimless glasses who relies on pure logic to make judgments and tries to avoid emotional distractions. Another juror of seven (Jack Walden), who had earlier bought a ticket to a basketball game, became increasingly impatient, and he changed his voting decision just to let the matter end as soon as possible. Juror No. 11 (George Voskovec), an immigrant who speaks fluent English, criticized the former: "Who told you that you have the right to play with someone else's life like this?" Before that, Juror No. 11 was attacked by others because of his status as a foreigner: "They came here, and their butts were not hot, and they were anxious to tell us what kind of verdict we should make." ”
In his book Making a Movie, One of the most insightful and knowledgeable film books, Lumet talks about the film's visual strategy. As he prepared for the film, he said he suddenly thought of a kind of "shot plot" in which he slowly lengthened the focal length of the shot as the story progressed, in order to make the room look smaller, so that the background looked closer to the characters. "Also," he writes, "I put the shot above the horizon in the first third of the film, the shot at the same height as the horizon in the third, and the camera below the horizon in the last third." That way, by the end, the ceiling starts to appear in the shot. It's not just the walls that're being pulled closer, so are the ceilings. This ever-increasing sense of containment goes a long way toward raising the tension at the end of the film. He commented that in the film's final shot, he used a wide-angle shot "so that we could finally catch our breath." ”
The film is like a textbook for directors who are interested in how the choice of shots affects the audience's emotions. By gradually lowering the camera position, Lumet explained another principle of composition: the high camera tends to dominate, and the low camera tends to form domination. At the beginning of the film, we look down at the characters, and this angle implies that they are something we can understand and control. By the end of the film, we look up at them, and we feel overwhelmed by their passion. Lumet rarely uses close-ups, but when used, they are effective: especially when used on a person—Juror No. 9 (Joseph Sweeney, the oldest of the jury members)—close-ups of his face often fill the entire shot because his words hit the nail on the head, pointing out obvious facts that others have overlooked.