12 Angry Men

12 Angry Men (1957)

Timing: 1:37 (97 min)

8.559/10
9884

8.529/10
148462

9/10
978000

All about film

Video 9

Photo 127

Actors and characters

Release date

1957-04-10

Country

United States

Production

United Artists, Orion-Nova Productions

Genre

Drama

Budget

$397 751

Revenue

$4 360 000

Website

Director

Sidney Lumet

Actors

Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Henry Fonda, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

Henry Fonda, Reginald Rose

Operator

Boris Kaufman

Composer

Kenyon Hopkins

Artist

Audition

Editing

Carl Lerner
All team (15)

• At the beginning of the film, all cameras are positioned above eye level, and wide-angle lenses are used during filming to visually increase the distance between the characters. As the plot develops, the cameras are lowered to eye level during filming. By the end of the film, almost all filming is done with cameras positioned below eye level, and sometimes close-ups are used with telephoto lenses to enhance the feeling of claustrophobia.
• Director Sidney Lumet (1924-2012) kept the actors in a room for several hours, made them learn their lines, but didn't start filming; he wanted them to understand what it was like to spend a long time in a room with the same people.
• The teenager suspect's ethnicity was not specified intentionally. The filmmakers wanted to show only that he was not of European descent, and that the bias (and lack thereof) of some jurors was a significant part of the entire process.
• Rehearsals took 2 weeks, so the entire filming process had to be completed in 21 days.
• Due to budget constraints, the lighting was set up in such a way that filming could only be done from one specific angle, so all scenes from that angle had to be filmed in one go. Therefore, scenes of conversations where characters are shown to the viewer from different angles had to be filmed not simultaneously, but in several takes, with a time difference of up to several days. Moreover, the actors were often filmed completely alone, after which other characters were added to the frame during editing.
• Producer Henry Fonda (1905-1982) chose Lumet as the director because he already had experience working in television, and because he always met deadlines and stayed within budget.
• The film did not perform well at the box office, and Henry Fonda did not receive the promised fee for it, but he still considered "Twelve Angry Men" one of his three best films, alongside the dramatic road movie "The Grapes of Wrath" (John Ford, 1940) and the Western "The Ox-Bow Incident" (William A. Wellman, 1942).
• Henry Fonda disliked watching himself on screen, so he didn’t stay until the end of the screening room showing of the film. Before leaving, he quietly whispered to the director: “Sidney, it’s magnificent.”
• When the jurors try to determine how many seconds the old man could have reached the door, Juror #2 states that Juror #8 reached it in 40 seconds. In reality, 30 seconds had passed.
• When the jurors try to determine how many seconds it would have taken the old man to reach the door, Juror No. 2 states that Juror No. 8 reached it in 40 seconds. In reality, 30 seconds had passed.