Cinema: New Picture, Apr. 29, 1957

Twelve Angry Men (Orion-Nova; United Artists). "And wretches hang," wrote Alexander Pope, "that jurymen may dine." The force of Pope's words came home to Television Playwright Reginald Rose when he served on a New York jury. In 1954, in a 50-minute playlet produced on CBS, he threw a harsh light on the dangers inherent in trial by jury. He sat a national audience in the jury box and let them find out for themselves what an abyss of conscience the plank of constitutional law is laid across, and how it feels in the pit of an honest juryman's stomach when he has to walk that plank.

For this 95-minute film the writer has bodied out his characters, stropped sharp his implication that the defendant in the case is not only this jury but the entire jury system, and even justice itself as the Anglo-American mind conceives it. And with a mixture of classic craft and hard-cover whodunitism that sometimes suggests a weirdly successful collaboration between Aeschylus and Agatha Christie, Scenarist Rose has jittered his melodrama with fierce juridical excitement.

The picture begins as the trial ends on a sweltering summer afternoon in Manhattan's Court of General Sessions. A heat-beat judge grumps his charge to a jury half dissolved with humidity and boredom. The camera takes one long look at the defendant, a scared little slum bunny accused of taking his old man apart with a switchblade, and follows the twelve men into the jury room—the main institutional horror that looks (and probably smells) as if it used to be a mop closet. For the next hour and a half the moviegoer never gets his nose out of that room, or out of the mess that justice is in.

In the first minutes, in the collars-off climate of thank God that's over, the camera casually meets the members of the jury, and the moviegoer quickly realizes that the writer has cunningly cut a cross section of the metropolitan community to try and to be tried by his case.

One (Martin Balsam), for instance, is a phys. ed. instructor in a city high school, 30-some, decent and a little dumb. Three (Lee J. Cobb) is the boss of a messenger service, a dispositional bully who would rather punch somebody than stand up to his own problems. Four (E. G. Marshall) is a broker so coldblooded he never even sweats. Seven (Jack Warden) is a marmalade salesman who can really spread it on, and who is all for rushing the defendant to the chair so that he can hurry off to a seat of his own—at the evening ball game. Eight (Henry Fonda) is a mild-mannered, intelligent architect. Nine (Joseph Sweeney) is a cranky old pensioner, but smart. Ten (Ed Begley) runs a string of garages and spits like a battery syringe whenever the subject of race comes up. Twelve (Robert Webber) is an adman who can't distinguish the truth from a slogan.

Twelve good men and true, with a boy's life in their hands. They take a vote: eleven for conviction and one—the architect—for acquittal. "Boyoboy," says the garageman, "there's always one."

And so the battle begins. It rages within the four relentless walls like a chain reaction in a uranium furnace. Time and again a scene starts to run wild; but just at the last instant, Scriptwriter Rose inserts the dramatic equivalent of a cadmium rod—a space of near inactivity. And the excitement simmers down to the point where he can safely start it up again.