Anger among the jury results in justice

Rating: 8/10 (16 January 2011)

This classic movie has an excellent cast of well-known actors in a story that goes to the heart of the justice system. From the beginning, it is apparent that the young man on trial for a murder is saddled with a jury that is totally unfit to pass judgement on whether he should live or die. Very few of these men should have passed a jury selection process; they were impulsive, lacking in compassion, ignorant of the law, and highly prejudiced against anyone not like themselves,except for two or three. This wedge enabled Henry Fonda, the lone dissenting voice at the start, to make a series of points that eventually blew away the arguments that the young man was guilty. During the process of passing judgement, the jury is subject to an intense self-examination of their own prejudices and opinions.
As the movie goes along, the viewer is appalled at the mentality of the group, with no understanding of the scope of their responsibility. The foreman, Martin Balsam, takes his job very routinely and would have easily allowed the jury to pass judgement without any reflection. The movie was very effective in showing the men sweat and fly off the handle in the midst of a New York heatwave that made them eager to get away from the courtroom. At one point, one of the last holdouts, E.G. Marshall, playing an unemotional and stone-faced juror, was forced to wipe his brow under a barrage of questioning from Henry Fonda that exposed the falsehood of his assumptions. We see similar cutaways to Lee J. Cobb, who eventually loses his grip as others take the opposite side in the argument.
This is a tense and unvarnished look at human beings thrown together in a jury and it shows the forces at play that would deny that justice be done. I am sure that this movie and others gave rise to some of the changes to the American justice system over the last 60 years to prevent the miscarriages of justice that probably occurred in many cases. A great movie and a lesson in the due process of law.