“Life is in their hands-death is in their minds.” A very simple sentence is good enough to summarize the movie ’12 Angry Men.’ 12 middle class men set to reach a decision against a teenage Puerto Rican boy who had been accused of killing his own father. The entire film filmed in a small New York City jury room, on the hottest day of the year. The movie first came out in April, 1957 by director Sidney Lumet based on famous writer Reginald Rose’s story. This movie considered as one of the best drama movie of all time with 8.9 Internet Movie Database rating. What makes this movie is so special? Strong background story, characters, and solid logical story ending are the main strength of this movie.
Strong background story is a very important to make a movie meaningful and legendary. As an old movie lover, 12 angry Men is always in my top list drama movie. The movie started in a court room where a Puerto Rican boy accused for killing his own father. Then, he ordered to be executed; however, as a rule of American constitution, before execution a juror board have to be held to decide the final decision. As a result, the judge retire a board of twelves people who were brought from different places. Twelve men sit down in a small room and started saying their opinion about the guilty, though nobody knows the boy is really guilty or innocent. However, in the movie its shows that the guilty had never tried to defend himself when he was order to be executed. For this reason, most of the juror already assume that there is nothing to worry about the case. Because, the case was already decided and everybody knows there is no chance to make the guilty innocent and nobody will not try it. Nevertheless, the story turned around when the first ballot is taken.
After taking first ballot, 10 of the fellow juror raise their hand against the guilty but juror No, 8. He holdout and said, “We’re talking about somebody’s life here, we can’t decide in five minutes. Supposing we’re wrong?” All other 11 jurors looks very disappointing after juror No, 8 Henry Fonda, holdout his decision. The one things I like about Henry Fonda’s character in this movie is, he always offers others to discuss about the matter. In the movie, they build henry’s character like an iron-heart man, because so many time he said, “We cannot let a young man to die until we prove he is a guilty.” As a first evidence of murder, jurors request to see the knife which was found in guilt’s house beside the dead body. After they see the knife, most of the juror claimed that this is a very rare switchblade, and the boy bought it for the murder. However, juror №8 refused and stated that it is a very common knife and anybody can buy it from the store at any time. After a long warm discussion, juror No, 8 strikes and takes out an exact same knife from his pocket that he brought from the guilt’s neighborhood. Then, he request to call secret ballet. The ballot is apprehended and a new not guilty vote appears. An angry Juror 3 accuses Juror 5, who grew up in a slum, of changing his vote out of sympathy of slum children. The other jurors were trying bring more evidence against the boy but, juror 8 refused all of their evident by made some strong logic against the evidence. After that, a new things appear and it is comes from personality conflict, dialogue and body language.
A new ballet requested by juror 8 after he denied a lots of fake evidence against the guilty. One of them collect the vote and the result was innocent 8–4 guilty. An angry Juror 3 shouts that they are losing their chance to “burn” the boy; however, his apologies for his furies comment later. The 4 jurors who still thinks the boy is guilty were not very clear about the evidence that juror 8 showed them. They need to be clearer. The very big things came at the end like other movies, the only witness of the murder believes she saw the whole murder when she was laying down on her bed. After a moment, juror 9 realized that the women who witnessed the murder had a little indicate on her nose of wear glass. Juror 8 took his word from his mouth and asked juror 4 that would he wear glass when go to sleep. The answer was no and with juror 4, juror 12, 10 changed their vote to not-guilty. However, juror 3 still on his own decision. Later he burst out to cry and loudly said he really want to the boy die because of his own broken relationship with his son. Finally, he changed his mind and let the boy free as an innocent. Although it was unclear in the movie that who was the real murderer.
Indeed, the truth discovered that the boy was considered as a guilty is really not. Sometime it is very hard to win against majority but not impossible. If we follow up the whole movie first to last, we will see the man Henry Fonda as juror 8, started his fight against 11 other juror to find out the real truth though he did not know the boy was the guilty or not. Some of his hard work and self-confidence saved a innocent boy’s life.
