12 Angry Men

1957 - Dir.: Sidney Lumet - 1 hour 36 minutes

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 26th October, 2013

 
 In form, "12 Angry Men" is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the United States Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father. This is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue and body language, not action. It is a masterpiece of stylised realism.

The story is based on a television play by Reginald Rose. Rose and Henry Fonda acted as co-producers and put up their own money to finance the film. It was Sidney Lumet's first feature, although he was experienced in TV drama, and the cinematography was by the veteran Boris Kaufman, whose credits ("On the Waterfront," "Long Day's Journey into Night") show a skill for tightening the tension in dialogue exchanges. To make the room seem smaller as the story continued, he gradually changed to lenses of longer focal lengths, so that the backgrounds seemed to close in on the characters. "In addition," Lumet writes, "I shot the first third of the movie above eye level, shot the second third at eye level and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie." In the film's last shot, he observes, he used a wide-angle lens "to let us finally breathe."

This film is commonly used in business schools to illustrate team dynamics and conflict resolution techniques.
Nominated for 3 Oscars, the film lost out in all its categories to The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The "unusual-looking knife" is an Italian stiletto switchblade with a Filipino-style Kriss blade.