12 angry essay man summary
You cannot copy content from our website. If you need this sample, insert an email and we'll deliver it to you. This sample may contain not original content. Our professionals can rewrite it for you. Set in s America, a court jury is faced with sending a young man to face the death penalty for murder accused of killing his father.
Summary Of ' 12 Angry Men ' By Reginald Rose
In form, "12 Angry Men" is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father.
The film shows us nothing of the trial itself except for the judge's perfunctory, almost bored, charge to the jury. His tone of voice indicates the verdict is a foregone conclusion. We hear neither prosecutor nor defense attorney, and learn of the evidence only second-hand, as the jurors debate it.
Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But "12 Angry Men" never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt. The principle of reasonable doubt, the belief that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, is one of the most enlightened elements of our Constitution, although many Americans have had difficulty in accepting it.
Cobb as the jury first gathers in their claustrophobic little room. When the first ballot is taken, 10 of his fellow jurors agree, and there is only one holdout--Juror No. This is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue and body language, not action; where the defendant has been glimpsed only in a single brief shot; where logic, emotion and prejudice struggle to control the field.
It is a masterpiece of stylized realism--the style coming in the way the photography and editing comment on the bare bones of the content. Released in , when Technicolor and lush production values were common, "12 Angry Men" was lean and mean. It got ecstatic reviews and a spread in Life magazine, but was a disappointment at the box office.
Over the years it has found a constituency, however, and in a Internet Movie Database poll it was listed 23rd among the best films of all time. The story is based on a television play by Reginald Rose , later made into a movie by Sidney Lumet , with Rose and Henry Fonda acting as co-producers and putting up their own money to finance it. It was Lumet's first feature, although he was much experienced in TV drama, and the cinematography was by the veteran Boris Kaufman , whose credits " On the Waterfront ," "Long Day's Journey into Night" show a skill for tightening the tension in dialogue exchanges.
The cast included only one bankable star, Fonda, but the other 11 actors were among the best then working in New York, including Martin Balsam , Lee J. Cobb, E. They smoke, they sweat, they swear, they sprawl, they stalk, they get angry. In a length of only 95 minutes it sometimes feels as if the movie is shot in real time , the jurors are all defined in terms of their personalities, backgrounds, occupations, prejudices and emotional tilts.
Evidence is debated so completely that we feel we know as much as the jury does, especially about the old man who says he heard the murder and saw the defendant fleeing, and the lady across the street who says she saw it happen through the windows of a moving L train.
We see the murder weapon, a switch-blade knife, and hear the jurors debate the angle of the knife wound. We watch as Fonda imitates the shuffling step of the old man, a stroke victim, to see if he could have gotten to the door in time to see the murderer fleeing. In its ingenuity, in the way it balances one piece of evidence against another that seems contradictory, "12 Angry Men" is as meticulous as the summation of an Agatha Christie thriller.
But it is not about solving the crime. It is about sending a young man to die. The movie is timely in view of recent revelations that many Death Row convictions are based on contaminated evidence. Supposing we're wrong? The defendant, when we glimpse him, looks "ethnic" but of no specific group. His eyes are ringed with dark circles, and he looks exhausted and frightened. In the jury room, some jurors make veiled references to "these people.
It's born in them. They don't know what the truth is. And let me tell you, they don't need any real big reason to kill someone, either Even those who think the defendant is guilty can't sit and listen to Begley's prejudice. The scene is one of the most powerful in the movie. The vote, which begins as to-1, shifts gradually. Although the movie is clearly in favor of the Fonda position, not all of those voting "guilty" are portrayed negatively.
One of the key characters is Juror No. Marshall , a stockbroker wearing rimless glasses, who depends on pure logic and tries to avoid emotion altogether. Another Juror No. Juror No. The visual strategy of the movie is discussed by Lumet in Making Movies, one of the most intelligent and informative books ever written about the cinema. In planning the movie, he says, a "lens plot" occurred to him: To make the room seem smaller as the story continued, he gradually changed to lenses of longer focal lengths, so that the backgrounds seemed to close in on the characters.
In that way, toward the end the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie. The movie plays like a textbook for directors interested in how lens choices affect mood.
By gradually lowering his camera, Lumet illustrates another principle of composition: A higher camera tends to dominate, a lower camera tends to be dominated. As the film begins we look down on the characters, and the angle suggests they can be comprehended and mastered.
By the end, they loom over us, and we feel overwhelmed by the force of their passion. Lumet uses closeups rarely, but effectively: One man in particular--Juror No. For Sidney Lumet, born in , "12 Angry Men" was the beginning of a film career that has often sought controversial issues.
Consider these titles from among his 43 films: "The Pawnbroker" the Holocaust , "Fail-Safe" accidental nuclear war , "Serpico" police corruption , " Dog Day Afternoon " homosexuality , " Network " the decay of TV news , " The Verdict " alcoholism and malpractice , " Daniel " a son punished for the sins of his parents , " Running on Empty " radical fugitives , and " Critical Care " health care.
There are also comedies and a musical " The Wiz ". If Lumet is not among the most famous of American directors, that is only because he ranges so widely he cannot be categorized.
Few filmmakers have been so consistently respectful of the audience's intelligence. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Reviews 12 Angry Men. Roger Ebert September 29, Now playing. Dangerous Lies. Bad Therapy. Circus of Books. Film Credits.
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The movie Twelve Angry Men begins with an eighteen year old boy from the ghetto Twelve Angry Men: Summary & Analysis Can We Write Your Essay? Free Essay: Joshua Bennett American Literature 12 Angry Men by Reginald Rose Plot Development of Act 1 In Act 1 of 12 Angry Men, all the jurors.
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The movie Twelve Angry Men begins with an eighteen year old boy from the ghetto who is on trial for the murder of his abusive father.
They were placed in the room until conclusion as to whether the boy convicted of murder was convicted or not. The jury's manager 1 sits at the top of the table.
12 angry essay man summary
In form, "12 Angry Men" is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father. The film shows us nothing of the trial itself except for the judge's perfunctory, almost bored, charge to the jury. His tone of voice indicates the verdict is a foregone conclusion. We hear neither prosecutor nor defense attorney, and learn of the evidence only second-hand, as the jurors debate it.
Twelve Angry Men: Summary & Analysis
Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Log in or Sign up. You fell asleep in the middle of your favorite television show. Your only hope is to ask your best friend what happened in the episode when you see him or her the next day. Your friend begins to tell you all of the important events that happened in the show the night before. Your friend is providing you with a summary. A summary includes the most important events of a piece of writing and is much shorter than the original text. In a summary, certain details are essential, and others are omitted. For example, a character's life decision explained to his family over breakfast would be included in a summary, but what cereal the character ate would not. Only the most important information is included in a summary.
A jury holdout attempts to prevent a miscarriage of justice by forcing his colleagues to reconsider the evidence. The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young man is guilty or innocent of murdering his father.
Picture a room with a large table in the center. There is a door, but it is locked.
Twelve Angry Men: Summary & Synopsis
We learn that this is a murder case and that, if found guilty, the mandatory sentence for the accused is the death penalty. After these instructions, the jurors enter. The men file in and decide to take a short break before deliberating. All the jurors presume the obvious guilt of the defendant, whom we learn has been accused of killing his father. Eventually, the twelve sit down and a vote is taken. The jurors react violently against this dissenting vote. Ultimately, they decide to go around the table, explaining why they believe the boy to be guilty, in hopes of convincing 8th Juror. A woman living across the street testified that she saw the boy kill his father through the windows of a passing elevated train. Finally, the boy has an extensive list of prior offenses, including trying to slash another teenager with a knife. There is a strong rallying against the defendant. They agree to this and vote by secret ballot. Immediately, the jurors turn on 5th Juror , accusing him of having changed his vote out of sympathy for the boy. After another heated discussion which raises the question of why the boy would have returned home, after killing his father, they take another vote. After a brief argument, 8th Juror brings into question whether or not the downstairs neighbor, an old man who had suffered a stroke and could only walk slowly, could have gotten to the door to see the boy run down the stairs in fifteen seconds, as he had testified.
12 Angry Men Summary
JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. We enter a courthouse and see twelve men sitting in a jury box. The judge gives them instructions to reach a ruling on a trial for first-degree murder. The accused is an eighteen year-old kid who's been charged with murdering his dad, and all of the jurors seem pretty convinced that he did it. It barely takes them any time to vote for Guilty when they enter the jury room. But one holds out for a Not Guilty verdict. In the U.
