Like many directors of his generation (Elia Kazan, Nick Ray, Arthur Penn for starters) Sidney Lumet came to movies from theatre. His first film mostly plays out in real time and is almost entirely restricted to a single setting, the jury room where 12 strangers (all of them white men) deliberate on the likelihood that a Puerto Rican teenager murdered his father. It’s an open-and-shut case for 11 of them. But Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) is not convinced. Lumet assembled a fine cast and persuaded everyone to commit to two weeks’ rehearsal together before shooting — unusual for movies then and now. But the results are both nuanced and gripping. The jury room becomes a microcosm for the tensions roiling through New York and the USA at the time. Fonda, of course, is the idealized liberal in playwright Reginald Rose’s schema, a kind of Joe Biden figure. Hard to feel confident in the outcome of the case if it were played out today.
A masterclass in the pure dynamism of acting.
William Thomas, Empire
One of the great ’50s actors’ showcases.
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Sidney Lumet
Henry Fonda, Lee J Cobb, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, EG Marshall, Jack Klugman
USA
1957
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Screenwriter
Reginald Rose
Cinematography
Boris Kaufman
Editor
Carl Lerner
Original Music
Kenyon Hopkins
Art Director
Robert Markel
Also in This Series
Getting Real charts the evolution of screen acting in American film from 1945-1980, diving into the psychological realism which took audiences somewhere deeper and more authentic than ever before.
Wanda
Barbara Loden's vérité feminist masterpiece, a landmark in the history of women filmmakers -- and "the anti-Bonnie & Clyde". "Writer-director-actor Barbara Loden's 1970 feature has a wonderful, hard-won sense of everyday rapture," Chuck Bowen, Slant
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Horace McCoy's existential Great Depression novel is the basis for a brutally compelling movie, and the first performance where Jane Fonda could show her chops. She's one of many desperate souls competing in a dance marathon that lasts for days and weeks.
The China Syndrome
Jane Fonda is a lightweight local news anchor sent to film a puff piece about clean, limitless energy at a nuclear power plant with cameraman Michael Douglas. As luck would have it, they witness chaos in the control room and an emergency shutdown.
Little Big Man
Dustin Hoffman ages a century in Arthur Penn's epic picaresque anti-western, the tall tale of 121-year-old Jack Crabb, a white man rescued and raised by the Cheyenne, a one-time snake-oil salesman, gunslinger, and mule skinner under General George Custer.
Husbands
Men behaving badly: reeling from the death of a friend, three middle-aged buddies go on an epic drinking binge. It's not enough. They roll home, collect their passports, and take off for a weekend of gambling, women and booze in London.
Nashville
With 26 actors getting more-or-less equal screen time and half of them singing their own tunes, Robert Altman's state-of-the-nation satire on bicentennial USA is a movie that repays multiple views.