’12 Angry Men’: the ignorance and naivety behind one of the greatest movies ever made

A dozen characters, none of which have names. A single setting. An hour-and-a-half of talking, shouting, more talking, and more shouting. This doesn’t sound like much of a movie, but in reality, it is the skeleton of one of the greatest films ever made – Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. 

Based on a teleplay from Reginald Rose, this 1957 courtroom drama is widely held up as an all-time classic. Starring Henry Fonda, Ed Begley, Jack Warden, and E J Cobb, the story brings together 12 ordinary people as part of a jury. Their job is to decide whether a teenage boy accused of murdering his abusive father should face the electric chair. Throughout the film, the audience learns more and more about the men, their lives, their circumstances, and their reasons for voting the way that they do. It is a masterful critique of ideas big and small and rightfully remains a standout of 1950s cinema. 

Remarkably, 12 Angry Men was Lumet’s first-ever film. Managing a dozen Hollywood-sized egos on your first job sounds like a nightmare, but at least Lumet didn’t have to constantly worry about changing sets. That must have made things easier, right? Well, not according to the man himself. 

“It was very difficult to shoot a movie in one room,” Lumet told NPR in 1988. “I just plunged in with complete ignorance knowing what I wanted to do with camera [sic], knowing that I could make the camera a good interpretive part of the movie itself. And I may have felt enormously secure at the confinement of it because my background, as you say, had been live television and theatre. So the idea of staging something in one room was something that came very easily to me.”

Prior to his film career, Lumet had been a successful stage actor. Either side of a stint in World War II, Lumet appeared in numerous Broadway and Off-Broadway productions before forming his own theatre company and serving as its director. He also worked as a drama teacher at various institutions before moving into television. He established himself as a reliable hand, especially when it came to directing the adaptation of stage plays. It was here where he first came across Rose’s work, which is what set him on a collision course with 12 Angry Men.

Alongside the stacked cast of jurors, Lumet also directed the likes of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, Faye Dunaway in Network, and Paul Newman in The Verdict. When asked if there was a difference between actors of the 12 Angry Men generation and those who came later, the maestro asserted that there wasn’t. “The basic craft of acting has, in the United States, has been set for some years,” he said.

“Even before the method came in,” he continued. “Basically, people like [Henry] Fonda worked out of a profound sense of truth. In fact, a man like Fonda didn’t know how to do anything falsely and used himself. He used himself brilliantly. Both of those elements are foundations of the method. And even though he wasn’t called a method actor in the sense of having studied the method, he basically worked out of that as most good actors did.”

12 Angry Men was nominated for three awards at the 1958 Oscars, including Best Picture, but failed to win anything. To be fair, it lost to The Bridge on the River Kwai. In 2007, the National Film Registry chose it for preservation, securing its status as one of the most important films ever made. 

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