Watch it at home!

Rating: 8/10 (13 December 2017)

As a theatrical movie, 12 Angry Men, hemmed in by its extremely scant production values, holds only mild interest at best. As a DVD, however, in any of the excellent versions marketed by M-G-M, 12 Angry Men comes across as an engrossing and tense drama that keeps the viewer's eyes fixed on the TV screen for every second of its 95 minutes.
Why the difference? Simply the movie's genesis in a TV play and the rigid intention of producers Rose and Fonda to keep strictly within the play's one-room setting, aside from a brief prologue and epilogue, and an inconsequential scene in a washroom. As a TV play, 12 Angry Men is such an expertly crafted drama, it justifiably ranks as one of the best ever presented. As a movie, however, it's close to a no-show.
I wonder how many of its thousands of ecstatic admirers have actually seen 12 Angry Men presented in a real cinema on a real 1.85:1 theater screen?
Including me, it's my guess you could count that number on your fingers. The picture just doesn't work half as effectively on a cinema screen. It's too confined. True, it still has some emotional highs, mostly due to the very clever interpretations by both Jack Warden and Joseph Sweeney, who contrive to steer a charismatic middle course between the stridently way over-the-top yelling and screaming by Begley and Cobb and the frozen-faced, overly unemotional Fonda, Klugman, Webber and Voskevec.
Actually, on a theater screen, Warden actually comes across with much greater impact than he does on TV. In a cinema, he and Sweeney play the characters with whom audiences most identify. Fonda seems too cold. Yet on TV, he's perfect! True, hats-off reviews ensured the movie sold a lot of tickets, but theater patrons were often disappointed.