Once More Around The Table

Rating: 7/10 (21 July 2008)

A courtroom drama which spends about a minute inside an actual courtroom, "12 Angry Men" defies expectations in other ways, too, most particularly by not being a star vehicle despite starring Henry Fonda.
It's a bit of a Trojan Horse, too; screenwriter Reginald Rose making his case against the death penalty by showing a kid who appears guilty of having stabbed his father in a moment of rage and encouraging us to root for jury nullification, a la OJ, because he shouldn't have to die for his crime. If the charge wasn't first-degree murder and execution not concomitant with a guilty verdict, we might see the pesky Mr. Davis (Fonda) and his tireless "supposing" not much differently than does angry Juror #3 (Lee J. Cobb).
"It's now your duty to sit down and try and separate the facts from the fancy," a supremely bored judge tells the jury at the start of the movie.
But a lot of "fancy" gets tossed around in the jury room, not just ethnic slurs from Juror #10 (Ed Begley) and baseball chatter from Juror #7 (Jack Warden), two solid early votes for conviction. Much of the fancy comes from Davis himself, who asks the other jurors to accept an odd set of coincidences and aspersions in order to ignore the stubborn fact that someone walked into a man's apartment and stabbed him to death with the same kind of switchblade that had belonged to his angry son.
"This kid's been kicked around all his life," Davis says. "He's had a pretty miserable 18 years. I think we owe him a few words."
Does anyone really believe this should work? Well, in "12 Angry Men" it does, aided by Rose's clever manipulation, Sidney Lumet's seamless but unshowy directing, and a performance by Fonda that demonstrates his egoless mastery of the screen acting craft at its near-height. The supporting cast is great, too, even the underdiscussed ones like Ed Binns' salt-of-the-earth painter #6 and Robert Webber's marketing whizkid #12, who apparently invents Rice Krispies before our very eyes.
The script does have its weak moments, none worse than when #10 goes off on his unfortunate diatribe regarding "them", in which all but two of his fellows leave their seats and symbolically turn away from him. A Richard Thomas stage production I saw handled this awkward business more cleverly. The music is a collection of ugly off-notes, and much of the background chatter is unconvincing.
"12 Angry Men" does have terrific setwork and piercing character moments, like how stuffy stockbroker #4 (E.G. Marshall) sniffily ignores #3's attempt to hand him a business card. Cobb as #3 is stuck with the most over-the-top moments, but sells them well. Cobb could yell with the best of them, and proves it here.
But "12 Angry Men", while a good movie, is not great film, pushing a dubious rooting interest for a killer's freedom. Maybe he doesn't deserve to die, but "12 Angry Men" stacks the deck too much in his favor to be called high art.