The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sidney Lumet · a film · 1957 · about 96 minutes · screenplay by Reginald Rose from his own television play · United Artists
Mode
Chamber drama of deliberation; the courtroom picture turned inward to the jury room
Mythos
The one who stands against the many and turns them; the questioner who makes the city see itself; the victim the city would sacrifice for its own ease
Phase
From the judge’s charge to the courthouse steps: a sequence of ballots, each turned by a piece of evidence or the breaking of a man
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 96 minutes, in English; one principal set, a short prologue in the courthouse, a scene in the washroom and a brief epilogue on the steps
Register
Heat and pressure: shirtsleeves, a fan that will not work, tempers rising toward violence, a storm that breaks over the city, and a close kept deliberately small
Scale
Twelve nameless men, a guard, a judge and a silent defendant; through them the law, a city and a nation’s types
Governing Proposition
Twelve men are shut in a hot room to decide whether a boy they never meet will die, and eleven of them have decided before they sit down. The wager of the film is that a verdict is made by particular men out of their histories, their impatience and their resentments, that reasonable doubt is not a phrase but a labour someone must perform against the room, and that a camera which never leaves the room can make the whole of that labour visible.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the courthouse, briefly. A judge, bored, gives the jury its charge, and with it the power over a life. The camera moves slowly to the boy’s face. He says nothing, and the film will not see him again. Then the twelve men file into the jury room, into the heat of a summer afternoon, and a guard shuts the door on them.
They have no names. They are numbered by their seats, and the film keeps them so until the last minute. A businessman, a salesman, a bigot, a labourer, a watchmaker, an old man, an advertising man, and the rest, each a type of a nation and each made a particular: the seventh has tickets to a ball game, and the fan on the wall will not work. The room is the whole world of the film, with a washroom beside it for a scene and the steps outside for the end.
Sidney Lumet directed it, his first feature, from Reginald Rose’s screenplay of his own television play, broadcast live on CBS’s Studio One in 1954. Henry Fonda and Rose produced it for Orion-Nova; Boris Kaufman photographed it in black and white, Carl Lerner edited it and Kenyon Hopkins wrote the music. United Artists released it in April 1957, about 96 minutes long. One version circulates, and the film as released is the whole of the work.
Movement II
The first vote is taken by show of hands, and it is eleven to one for guilty. The one is the eighth juror, played by Henry Fonda. The others want to go home. He proves little and asks much. The count of ballots, from here to the end, is the film’s only plot.
The eighth juror asks questions. The case against the boy rests in part on a knife, and he takes from his pocket one he has bought, exactly like it, and drives it into the table beside the first. The two stand side by side, identical. The film rises here for the first time, and the rise is one of pressure: a fact has been put on the table, and the room must answer it.
A secret ballot follows, and when the papers are counted there is a second vote for not guilty. It is the ninth juror’s, the old man played by Joseph Sweeney, and he explains, quietly, why he changed. Later he sees in the old witness his own wish to be listened to. Each juror is given, in this way, the scene that turns him.
Movement III
The evidence is rebuilt in the room, by bodies. Could the old man who lived below hear a cry through the noise of the elevated train? Could he have reached his door in the time he swore to? The eighth juror paces it out, and a watch times the walk. The fifth juror, raised in a slum, knows how a switchblade is used, and the angle of the wound is tried with a stab demonstrated downward. The boy’s memory of the film he saw that night is weighed.
The count turns in steps, and each turn is tied to one piece of evidence or one confrontation. The film shows nothing of the crime. There is no flashback and no trial; the audience has only what the jurors have, and the reconstruction is the drama. The eleventh juror, a watchmaker and an immigrant, speaks for the procedure the native-born around him take lightly.
The room closes as the argument hardens. Lumet’s own account, in his book Making Movies, is of a lens plan: wider lenses and higher angles early, longer lenses and lower angles later, so that the walls draw in and the ceiling comes into view. It is borne out on the screen. Lumet and Kaufman keep twelve men legible in a small space, so that the eye always knows who is watching whom, and the long takes round the table are clear and unforced. Outside, a storm breaks over the city.
Movement IV
The tenth juror, played by Ed Begley, speaks at last what has been under his vote: a tirade against “them”, the people the boy comes from. As he talks, the others rise one by one from the table and turn their backs on him. No one answers, and the rant collapses into silence. It is a scene of what bigotry sounds like to those who have stopped answering it, and it is the film’s clearest disclosure.
The last of the evidence is a woman who swore to what she saw. A juror rubs the marks on his nose, and the room remembers the same marks on hers: she wore glasses. E. G. Marshall’s juror, composed throughout, is broken only by a bead of sweat. The eyeglasses come at the moment they are needed, as each flaw in the case has come in its order; the room’s law is here and there the author’s design.
The film knows its conclusion before it starts, and its lesson is a liberal civic one; the eighth juror is never wrong, and the question whether the boy did it is left open only in form. What it discloses is not the verdict but how men reach one: the history each brings into the room, the resentment that passes for judgment, and the labour, performed by one man against eleven, of turning doubt into a reason.
Movement V
The third juror, played by Lee J. Cobb, is the last to hold out. His violence has risen through the film, and now his case against the boy comes open as his case against his own son. He takes out a photograph of the two of them and tears it. His hand cannot finish the gesture it began. He says “Not guilty”, and breaks down at the table.
The room empties. The eighth juror helps the third with his coat. Two subjects that could not be further apart, the angle of a wound and a father’s grief, have obeyed one law: each was a fact entered into the deliberation, and each changed a vote. On the courthouse steps, in the washed air after the rain, the eighth and ninth jurors exchange names for the first time, Davis and McCardle, and part. The men go separately into the city. The close is deliberately small.
The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1957 and was nominated for three Academy Awards, for picture, director and adapted screenplay. It has never left exhibition, broadcast or the classroom; it became the model of the jury film, it is taught in schools of law and management, and it has been remade and restaged in many countries and languages, in a television film of 1997 and in Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12 of 2007 among others, the jury changed in make-up and the structure intact.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hard on this film, and it is the film’s strength. Every ballot is earned by a piece of evidence or by a man breaking, and each juror is given the scene that turns him: the old man of the ninth, who sees in the old witness his own wish to be listened to; the fifth, raised in a slum, who knows how a switchblade is used; the eleventh, a watchmaker and an immigrant, who speaks for the procedure the native-born take lightly. Take away the eyeglasses and the last holdouts have no reason; take away the knife and the first doubt has no object. Little could go: the seventh juror’s baseball tickets are one note struck often, and the twelfth is drawn thinner than the rest. Held below the top band because the parts are required by a demonstration, and the demonstration shows.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a verdict is made by particular men out of their histories, their impatience and their resentments, and reasonable doubt is a labour someone has to perform against the room. The film shows prejudice disclosing itself in speech, in the tenth juror’s tirade and the others rising one by one to turn their backs on it, a scene of what bigotry sounds like to those who stop answering it. It shows the third juror’s case against the boy to be his case against his own son, and makes that visible in a torn photograph. What holds it short of the bar of the Epochal Gate: the lesson is a liberal civic one, known before the film begins; the eighth juror is never wrong; and the boy’s guilt is left open only in form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is that of pressure, not of grandeur, and it comes several times. A second knife is driven into the table beside the first, identical. At the secret ballot the old man explains, quietly, why he changed. The men at the table turn their backs on the tenth juror. At the end the third juror collapses, the photograph torn, a gesture he cannot finish, and another man helps him with his coat. The heat, the fan that will not work and the storm that breaks over the city make a climate of pressure and release. These are moments of moral force, strongly built and recurring. Held among the lowest of the twelve because the film does not reach terror, transport or beauty of the highest order; its height is that of a well made confrontation, and its close is deliberately small.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The archetypal structure is built, not merely evoked. The one man who stands against the many and turns them, the twelve as a tribunal and a people, the questioner who proves little and asks much until the city sees itself: the Socratic pattern bears weight. The nameless jurors are the types of a nation, the businessman, the bigot, the salesman, the immigrant, the old man, the labourer, and the film makes them particulars without losing the types. The unseen boy, judged by men who never meet him, carries the pattern of the sacrifice a city would make for its own ease. What holds it well below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the types are often only types, the seventh and twelfth jurors above all, and the myth is the civics book’s myth of the jury, evoked as often as it is made strange.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The turn is real. A feature confined almost wholly to one room, with no flashback to the crime, no trial shown and twelve men talking, made by a first-time director trained in live television, cheaply and independently, with Henry Fonda’s money in it. But the inheritance is short and close. Rose’s teleplay had proved the material on CBS in 1954; television drama had already reached the cinema with Marty (1955); the chamber play and the drama of argument were long traditions, and the courtroom picture an established genre. What swerves is the decision to stay in the room and make the camera’s tightening the drama, a departure in degree and in discipline more than in kind. That holds it, with The Sublime, among the lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its subject is deliberation, and its form is deliberation: the closed room, time that runs as it runs, the count of ballots as the only plot. Show the crime in flashback and the film becomes a whodunit, which it refuses to be; the audience has only what the jurors have, and the evidence is rebuilt in the room by bodies, an old man’s walk timed with a watch, a stab demonstrated downward, the marks of glasses on a juror’s nose. Lumet’s tightening of the lenses makes the room shrink as the argument hardens, so that the form carries the pressure the dialogue names. Just below the top band because the teleplay already held most of this knowledge; the film perfects a form it inherited.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The film has borne close return for nearly seventy years, and it yields on several fronts. It is an acting text, each of the twelve performances sustaining study; a staging text, its blocking of twelve men round a table studied by directors; and a text in law and in the teaching of reasoning and negotiation, where its method is argued over, the eighth juror’s purchase of the knife, the jurors’ own experiments, a verdict reached on speculation. Those arguments are evidence that it keeps giving. What holds the figure: its meaning is largely taken on a first viewing; it does not change shape on return as the deepest films do, and a second viewing confirms the craft more than it opens the subject.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Field: the American cinema of the 1950s and the passage from live television into features. Intrinsic force is moderate: the film did not reorganise what cinema could do; it showed with exceptional discipline that a single-set film of argument could hold a feature, and that the camera’s grammar alone could make a room close in. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide and still growing. It became the model of the jury film and of the chamber drama on screen; it has been remade and restaged across the world, in a television film of 1997 and in Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12 (2007) among others; it is a standard text in schools of law and management and in civic teaching; and its title has entered common use. It began Lumet’s career in features. Reach of that breadth lifts the figure; force of a modest kind keeps it short of 8.5.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-nine years. The form is whole: one version, as released, with no lost material of consequence, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous and wide, in exhibition, on television, in the classroom and among the old films most watched, and the work is remade and staged in many languages, which is presence of the strongest kind. The fabric is charged slightly: an all-white, all-male jury of 1950s New York in shirtsleeves, and a civic idiom of its decade. But the film has outlived the conditions that produced it, and remakes that change the make-up of the jury show that its structure travels. The dated surface holds it at the figure, above the bar of the Epochal Gate.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium is high and bears weight. Lumet and Boris Kaufman block twelve men in a small room so that the eye always knows where each of them is and who is watching whom; the lens plan narrows the space by degrees across ninety minutes; the long takes in which the camera moves round the table are clear and unforced. Carl Lerner’s cutting holds the rhythm of argument and gives reaction its weight. The ensemble is one of the most precise in American cinema: Cobb’s rising violence, Marshall’s composure broken only by a bead of sweat, Sweeney’s frailty, Begley’s collapse into a rant no one answers. Kenyon Hopkins’s score is sparse. Below the top marks because the craft is one of exactness within a theatrical frame, not an invention of image that is itself the vision.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the cold reconstruction of the angle of a wound and the third juror’s grief over his son. They obey the same physics. One law governs the whole: what is known is what can be reasoned or shown inside the room, and every man is moved by that and by what it uncovers in him. Each element is a fact entered into deliberation, and each changes a vote. The tone holds from the heat of the first minutes through the release of the rain to the quiet of the steps. The strain: the evidence falls a little too conveniently, each flaw in the prosecution found in its order, the eyeglasses remembered at the moment they are needed, so that the law of the room is in places the law of the author’s design; and the range is narrow by choice.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a chamber film of about ninety-six minutes holds. The law and the state, in the judge’s charge and its power over a life; class, in the slum the fifth juror came from and the boy lives in; the immigrant’s faith in a procedure the native-born neglect; age and its invisibility, in the ninth juror; the family, in the third juror’s broken relation with his son and the boy’s with the father he is said to have killed; prejudice as a social fact. Each is entered into the one argument. What holds the axis lowest: these orders are held as speech and as types, the boy and his world are never seen, and the sacred, labour and the natural order are absent or thin. A film in one room reaches this far by design and no further.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, The Living Form and The Made at 8.6. A film whole in its one version and continuously seen for sixty-nine years, remade and staged in many languages; a form in which deliberation is both the subject and the shape, a closed room and a count of ballots; and a making that keeps twelve men legible in one small space and narrows that space by degrees.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: the law, class, the immigrant, age, the family and prejudice held as speech and as types, with the boy’s world never seen and the sacred, labour and the natural order absent or thin. Then The Sublime and The Swerve at 7.6: a height of confrontation rather than of transport, and a turn of degree and discipline on a road the teleplay and the television drama had already opened.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Swerve at 7.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.1 from a sum of 97.2, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of 12 Angry Men as released by United Artists in April 1957: the one version, about 96 minutes, in black and white and in English, from the judge’s charge to the courthouse steps; restorations are repair and are not judged as a version. Directed by Sidney Lumet, his first feature; written by Reginald Rose from his own television play, broadcast live on CBS’s Studio One in 1954; produced by Henry Fonda and Reginald Rose for Orion-Nova; photographed by Boris Kaufman; edited by Carl Lerner; music by Kenyon Hopkins. With Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Henry Fonda, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec and Robert Webber, as the first to the twelfth jurors. Golden Bear, Berlin, 1957; nominated for three Academy Awards. The teleplay, the stage versions and the remakes are not the work and bear only on reach and survival. The account of the lens plan is Lumet’s own, from Making Movies. No print or script was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where certain, the two words of the verdict. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact order of the intermediate votes, the aspect ratio, the length of the shoot, whether the deliberation runs in continuous time, the film’s returns on first release, and some of the remakes abroad.