Why 12 Angry Men remains the ulti­mate ensem­ble drama

What makes a great ensem­ble dra­ma? Is it sim­ply down to the cast and how they are direct­ed, or do oth­er ele­ments hold just as much weight? Sid­ney Lumet’s 1957 film 12 Angry Men boasts one of the most tal­ent­ed casts ever assem­bled. But the film’s great­ness also lies in its use of a sin­gle loca­tion setting.

The court­room dra­ma, revolv­ing around jurors delib­er­at­ing over a mur­der tri­al, ques­tions our moral­i­ty as a soci­ety when con­front­ed with the task of com­ing to a ver­dict that will decide someone’s fate. As the film’s tagline states, ​‘Life is in their hands. Death is on their minds’.

Through­out the film we see Hen­ry Fonda’s Juror 8 stand alone on the ​‘not guilty’ side of the fence as he tries to win over his fel­low jury­men. Not con­vinced of the accused’s inno­cence him­self, he sim­ply wish­es to dis­cuss the out­come of the case beyond a rea­son­able doubt, some­thing the oth­er 11 men seem unwill­ing to entertain.

Con­sid­er­ing the film is essen­tial­ly just 12 men argu­ing around a table for 90 min­utes, Lumet had plen­ty to con­sid­er in terms of how to craft a com­pelling dra­ma, from the posi­tion­ing of the char­ac­ters to the amount of sweat drip­ping from their brows. The cast them­selves are excep­tion­al to a man, play­ing off one anoth­er superbly as the stronger per­sonas assert their dom­i­nance, brush­ing aside the weak­er char­ac­ters like feath­ers in the wind. More impor­tant­ly – and key to any suc­cess­ful ensem­ble piece – not a sin­gle one of them is superfluous.

All 12 men hold pur­pose and present them­selves admirably through­out, both as indi­vid­u­als and with­in the col­lec­tive group. Being cooped up in the 16ft by 24ft room forces this out of them. The cast were locked in a small rehearsal space togeth­er for two weeks pri­or to film­ing, so it’s no won­der they appear so nat­ur­al in their con­fined sur­round­ings. As a side note, it’s iron­ic that in a film about 12 men stuck in a room, the major­i­ty of the film­ing was done with only one or two of the cast present for any giv­en shot due to restric­tions on cam­era placement.

Lumet, in what was remark­ably his first fea­ture as a direc­tor, mas­ter­ful­ly manip­u­lates the juror’s iso­la­tion from the out­side world, while keep­ing the view­er in a con­stant state of ten­sion. Blood runs high, tem­pers flair and the walls actu­al­ly feel like they’re clos­ing in – the lat­ter being thanks to some sub­tle and inge­nious cam­era work.

Spend­ing so much time metic­u­lous­ly craft­ing the char­ac­ter of the room itself, seem­ing­ly triv­ial details are imbued with added sig­nif­i­cance. Tak­ing inter­est in a bro­ken fan as he enters the room, Jack Warden’s Juror 7 notes that it’s going to be the hottest day of the year. This heat vis­i­bly ris­es as the film unfolds, inten­si­fy­ing the men’s frus­tra­tion and turn­ing the mun­dane task of tak­ing off a jack­et into a sym­bol­i­cal­ly pow­er­ful image.

But it’s not just what’s going on in front of the cam­era that makes the film so effec­tive. Ear­ly on, the aver­age shot length is around 20 sec­onds – not uncom­mon for films made around that time. Yet around half of 12 Angry Men’s cuts occur in the last 20 min­utes of the film, a con­scious ploy by Lumet and edi­tor Carl Lern­er to grad­u­al­ly lure us into a state where we are com­plete­ly caught up in the cen­tral argument.

Ini­tial­ly Lumet shoots the char­ac­ters from a wide angle, to show that they are still find­ing their feet and estab­lish­ing them­selves. We are intro­duced to the men indi­vid­u­al­ly as each shares their per­son­al opin­ions of the case. In the film’s sec­ond act, the cam­era drops to the char­ac­ters’ eye lev­el. Some of the jurors have switch sides and the dis­cus­sion is becom­ing increas­ing­ly heated.

As the third act ticks around and the pow­er bal­ance between the char­ac­ters (specif­i­cal­ly Juror 8 and Lee J Cobb’s stub­born Juror 3) con­tin­ues to shift, the cam­era again shifts, this time adopt­ing an even low­er angle. This not only gives cer­tain char­ac­ters more suprema­cy, but cru­cial­ly it means we can now see the ceil­ing. As Lumet him­self once not­ed that, ​“The sense of increas­ing claus­tro­pho­bia did a lot to raise the ten­sion of the last part of the movie.”

Six­ty years on, 12 Angry Men remains a con­sum­mate ensem­ble dra­ma. Round­ed out by an incred­i­ble cast, Lumet’s real­i­sa­tion of Regi­nald Rose’s script didn’t require any­thing too bold or exag­ger­at­ed. It sim­ply took 12 men in a sin­gle room with some­thing impor­tant to talk about.