“Twelve Angry Men”

by Walter Olson on April 6, 2007

At American Thinker, Michael Margolies notes the fiftieth anniversary of “one of Hollywood’s most revered, indeed sacrosanct films”, but finds the work on calmer viewing to be emotionally manipulative, stacked from first frame to last, and even “dishonest”. (”12 Angry Men Turns 50″, Mar. 31).

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{ 6 comments }

1 Joe Bingham 04.05.07 at 11:35 pm

Funny this comes up literally 5 minutes after I watch Once Upon a Time in the West. In that movie he’s a conservative. At least, I guess he is, since he kills children for money.

2 Joe Bingham 04.06.07 at 12:20 am

I was unclear. By “he,” I meant Henry Fonda.

3 Zoe Brain 04.06.07 at 6:26 am

Of course, if “12 Angry Men” were made today, the exonerated Kid would have written a best-seller “If I had knifed my Father, this is how I would have done it.”

4 Ted 04.06.07 at 8:33 am

Every other Robot Chicken sketch is on YouTube, but, alas, not their satire of 12 Angry Men using Fisher-Price Little People.

5 Deoxy 04.06.07 at 10:06 am

It took him 5 years to figur this out? I knew it before they even released the film. Of course, that’s easy, since that description fits 99% of Hollywood films that even might be considered by a few to have political relevance…

6 William Nuesslein 04.08.07 at 7:27 am

‘12 Angry Men‘ was a great film, and amazingly, the remake was just as good. There was a theory of the case: the boy killed his father. Was the evidence selected on the basis of the theory, or was it objective evidence? In the Martha Stewart case, her disgorgement of 85,000 of 90,000 shares of Imclone stock long before her suspect trade of 3,928 shares was considered irrelevent. She also tendered her remaining 5,000 shares, the offer was for 20% of the company and that is why her sale was for a strange number of shares. She sold off her residual shares on advice of her broker at a time when tax selling is done. The trial was based on seeing evidence of guilt in her chit-chat with a friend, and a potential adjustment to a note on her computer. According to members of the jury, they started with the presumption of guilt and saw her actions as part of a cover-up of something.

More substantially, and perhaps a closer fit to the movie, was the incarceration of innocent young men in the famous Central-Park Jogger case. Once it was clear that the woman was the victim of a particularly bad guy and not of wilding teens, one could see how the authorities twisted their interpretations of testimony to fit a theory of the case. (There is no indication that the authorities acted in bad faith.)

Obviously the movie failed as a polemic. There was the acceptance in American courts of repressed memories, the fantastic stories in the day-care center cases, and inane theories in tort cases.

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