The following notes on 12 Angry Men were written by Garrett Strpko, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A DCP of 12 Angry Men will show on Friday, March 15 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas, 821 University Ave. This is the first of three screenings in our Fonda/Lumet series. Admission is free!

By Garrett Strpko

It might surprise viewers to know that 12 Angry Men, long regarded as a classic American film (number 87 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American movies), actually began its life as a television program. Screenwriter and playwright Reginald Rose first penned the script as a teleplay for the CBS live broadcast anthology series Studio One in 1954, where its broadcast was met with acclaim. The story follows a panel of twelve jurists in what seems at first to be a cut-and-dry homicide case. The seemingly inevitable verdict is shaken when Juror #8, played in the film by Henry Fonda, questions the conclusions of the prosecution and seeks to persuade his fellow jurors that the defendant, a minor accused of killing his father, is not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The ensuing debate reveals tensions between prejudice and righteousness, selfishness and altruism, fear and courage among and within the twelve individuals.

Perhaps because of its near-universally recognizable themes and characters, 12 Angry Men has proven to be a highly malleable work. Immediately following the television production’s success, Rose set out to continue producing the script in as many forms as possible, adapting it first for the stage and then pursuing a feature film version. Rose and the script eventually reached and interested Fonda, whose experience playing morally upright yet decidedly ordinary characters in films like The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) made him an excellent fit for Juror #8. Fonda jumped on to the project as a producer—the first and only time he would receive such credit for a feature film. To direct the project, Rose and Fonda hired Sidney Lumet, himself a budding television and Off-Broadway director whose work in the latter particularly garnered Fonda’s attention. This would be the first of three collaborations between the actor and director which the Cinematheque is presenting this March.

In his interview for the PBS series American Masters, Lumet stated that he had no interest in critiquing the criminal justice system with 12 Angry Men. “Absolutely not,” he remarks. “I was interested in doing my first movie, and I was very impressed that Henry Fonda wanted me as the director because he had seen something I had done off Broadway.” According to film scholar Stephen E. Bowles in the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, nearly half of Lumet’s films throughout his career had their origins in theater. 12 Angry Men’s affinities with the stage and with the related live teleplay format of the 1950s are clear. For one, the action takes place almost entirely (though not exclusively) within a single room. Furthermore, the action basically unfolds in ‘real time.’ That is, there is little to no use of editing devices such as dissolves, which would indicate a passage of time which we as the audience do not have access to. Rather, Lumet places us in the room to sit with these men and their frustration. We are there for the intense deliberations as well as the breaks, the heated discussion as well as awkward silences. Like your average play, the time experienced by the characters and by the audience is roughly the same.

Yet 12 Angry Men excels, and is well-remembered, precisely because it is not simply a filmed play. Its canonical status rests in how Lumet uses filmic techniques within this narrow set of parameters. Keen viewers will notice the importance of camera placement and staging. On the one hand, Lumet often employs angles at, or very often above, the eye level of the characters. These high, wide angles not only provide us with a sense of the space but provide insight into the dynamic relationships between the twelve characters by how they are staged alongside each other. Whereas on the stage the actors must be positioned so these relationships are clear from every point of view in the audience, the single point-of-view of the camera allows for unique and especially potent staging configurations. The most notable of these occurs close to the end of the film, when one of the jurors holding out for a ‘guilty’ verdict, #10 (Ed Begley), launches into a what quickly devolves into a racist diatribe against the defendant. His fellow jurors, one-by-one, turn and look away in shame, removing themselves to the edges of the room. From the high, wide angle of the camera, they form a sort of horseshoe along the edges of the frame, leaving Juror #10 stranded in center of it as his words begin to falter and the motivations for his ‘guilty’ verdict become uncomfortably clear.

Lumet counters such masterful use of high-angle wide shots with eye-level and low-angle close ups that bring out the actors’ engaging performances and manage to succinctly display the personality and motivations of each individual juror. As the twelve angry men get angrier and angrier, close-ups fill the frame with the force of each’s emotions. Many critics have noted that the use of high-angle wide shots becomes gradually overtaken by these affective close-ups as the film progresses, fostering a sense of increasing tension.

Finding its way from television, to the stage, and then to film (and back to television once more with William Friedkin’s 1997 adaptation), 12 Angry Men has maintained its relevance not only because it is a masterclass in adapting a work to film, but in large part due to how it marshals these strategies into a story concerning fundamental issues of justice. While Lumet may not have been very interested in doing so at the time, 12 Angry Men raises key questions regarding the moral role of citizens in society. What responsibilities do I hold to my government? To my community? How do I balance these with my individual rights and desires with these responsibilities? Who should have the power to decide if someone lives or dies? Ultimately, Rose’s script, Lumet’s style, and the actors’ performances all attest to the force of these questions.