Great Movies Ii Wo

12 Angry Men In form,12 Angry Menis a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as twelve men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father. The film shows us nothing of the trial itself except for the judge's perfunctory, almost bored, charge to the jury. His tone of voice indicates that the verdict is a foregone conclusion. We hear neither prosecutor nor defense attorney, and learn of the evidence only secondhand, as the jurors debate it. Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But12 Angry Mennever states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt. The principle of reasonable doubt, the belief that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, is one of the most enlightened elements of our Constitution, although many Americans have had difficulty in accepting it. "It's an open-and-shut case," snaps Juror No. 3 (Lee J. Cobb) as the jury first gathers in their claustrophobic little room. When the first ballot is taken, ten of his fellow jurors agree, and there is only one holdoutJuror No. 8 (Henry Fonda). This is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue, and body language, not action; where the defendant has been glimpsed only in a single brief shot; where logic, emotion, and prejudice struggle to control the field. It is a masterpiece of stylized realismthe style coming in the way the photography and editing comment on the bare bones of the content. Released in 1957, when Technicolor and lush production values were common,12 Angry Menwas lean and mean. It got ecstatic reviews and a spread inLifemagazine but was a disappointment at the box office. Over the years it has found a constituency, however, and in a 2002 Internet Movie Database poll it was listed twenty-third among the best films of all time. The story, based on a television play by Reginald Rose, was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet, with Rose and Henry Fonda acting as coproducers and putting up their own money to finance it. It was Lumet's first feature, although he was much experienced in TV drama, and the cinematography was by the veteran Boris Kaufman, whose credits (On the Waterfront,Long Day's Journey into Night) show a skill for tightening the tension in dialogue exchanges. The cast included only one bankable star, Fonda, but the other eleven actors were among the best then working in New York, including Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, and Robert Webber. They smoke, they sweat, they swear, they sprawl, they stalk, they get angry. In a length of only ninety-five minutes (it sometimes feels as if the movie is shot in real time), the jurors are all defined in terms of their personalities, backgrounds, occupations, prejudices, and emotional tilts. Evidence is debated so completely that we feel we know as much as the jury does, especially about the old man who says he heard the murder and saw the defendant fleeing, and the lady across the street who says she saw it happen through the windows of a moving El train. We see the murder weapon, a switchblade knife, and hear the jurors debate the angle of the knife wound. We watch as Fonda imitates the shuffling step of the old man, a stroke victim, to see if he could have gotten to the door in time to see the murderer fleeing. In its ingenuity, in the way it balances one piece of evidence against another that seems contradictory,12 Angry Menis as meticulous as the summation of an AgEbert, Roger is the author of 'Great Movies Ii Wo', published 2005 under ISBN 9780767919500 and ISBN 0767919505.