12 Angry Men

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