A Film Canon

12 Angry Men ushers in the Golden Age of American courtroom drama, as well as providing a prototype of the narrative twist that will become its particular preoccupation in Juror #8's (Henry Fonda) recommendation of a scepticism so radical that all 'facts', however seemingly objective or irrefutable, are called into question; a necessary counter-point to the hysterical assurance of the other jurors, which is McCarthyist in its intensity, and Republican in its hallucinatory equation of youth culture with patricide, especially in the hands of Juror #3 (Lee J. Cobb), whose tortured relationship with his own son fuels an invocation of pre-emptive genocide against the new generation. Similarly, playwright and screenwriter Reginald Rose deflects the paranoid patronism of the decade into a nuanced, ambient xenophobia, present everywhere but visible nowhere, as well as invoking early twentieth-century concerns about immigrant slums as an approximate, deliberately regressive vocabulary for responding to the emergent African-American ghetto, whose unspeakable citizens are pointedly omitted from the jury's melting-point. This intensity ensures that, despite taking place in a single room, the film never feels like a chamber drama, and rarely like a theatrical adaptation, to which end Lumet alternates between expressive close-ups, creative reframings of the room and long, fluid takes that embody the elliptical geometry that Juror #8's background as an architect allows him to apply, and that anticipates the obsessive logistics of the contemporary police and forensic procedurals.