Compact, vivid, progressive--not a civics lesson, but a study of human nature

Rating: 9/10 (26 September 2009)

12 Angry Men (1957)
What makes a movie shot almost entirely in a single room so compelling? It isn't the built-in civics lesson, even though it does make you glad for the jury system. Even more than the apparent plot about twelve men and their deliberations about a crime, there is a plot about human nature. The men are all etched just enough to become types--not stereotypes in a bad sense, miraculously, but kinds of people we recognize. And with amazing economy, the strengths and flaws of those kinds of people, simplified too much for reality but compressed just perfectly for the movies, become the guts of this play of passion.
It doesn't hurt that the editing is supremely crisp, the continuity is spot-on, and the casting is brilliant, if color-blind (see below). It also doesn't hurt one bit that the cinematography by Boris Kaufman (see On the Waterfront), is that really clear, dramatic black and white photography of post-noir 1950s. It's beautiful and startling, showing at times the interactions of the group in the room as a whole in a kind of walking ballet, and at other times close-ups of hot faces straining to come to terms with the other eleven people in the room. In other words, this is a technically virtuosic ensemble piece, cast and crew, top to bottom.
As viewers, it is this coming to understand people that makes us part of the scenario. We might see ourselves or our friends in these people, but even if they are strangers, if they seem a full half-century away from our own types, they are still people we are curious about. Sitting on a jury, being locked together in a room, and having to decide about the execution of the accused, all of this makes you grapple with personalities and motives quickly. There is not getting around deciding--both on the verdict, of course, but also on what kind of men are in the room. Why are they voting one way or the other? What makes them stubborn, or wise, or clever? Or funny, annoying, selfish?
The all white male jury is potentially a problem. It should have been a problem back then, when planning the movie, and it becomes one now because the movie represents history, whether or not it likes it. After the Civil War (by amending the Constitution, and with a Civil Rights Act in 1875) it was illegal to exclude blacks from juries, and this was tested in court many times (often in the South). New York City could easily end up with an all white jury (and downtown Manhattan it isn't unlikely) but it is surely conspicuous for a movie trying to represent the sweep of humanity in a single room. Likewise with women, who by the 1930s were regularly part of New York City juries. In the 1950s, white men might have been more clearly enrolled on the lists used to select jurors (such as voting lists), so again, an all-male white jury isn't so unlikely, just conspicuous.
Having said all that, I think the movie works partly because on some simple level, the jurors are all the same! To have made them more clearly diverse would have changed the way we saw them get to know each other. Having one guy be from a "slum" and know about knives is revealed slowly, and we can't really outwardly distinguish that man from any other. Even the one clear immigrant has assimilated. So 12 Angry Men isn't an accurate capsule or a documentary exercise, but a study in types and countertypes, reactions and resistance to action.
Director Sidney Lumet cut his teeth for a decade with early t.v. and when he ventured into movies (this was his first success) he did so with a visual reaction against the flatness and static cameras of much of that medium, back then especially. He and Fonda worked together notably in Fail-Safe, another politically charged drama in black and white (and one where Fonda is again trapped in a small room). And later, in Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico (both starring a young and amazing Al Pacino) he again uses a highly charged external problem to deal with psychological responses that are even more intense.
I want to live long enough to see this movie in 2057, just to see if it holds water once that period is looking quaint and distant (the way 1909 does to us from here). Already, as much as this is a fabulous, inspiring, vivid movie, it is also showing its seams, its contrivance, and its agenda too clearly. For now it's a concise dramatic masterpiece.