Six Dollars and Two Blocks

About twenty-seven minutes into 12 Angry Men, a man who has been sitting quietly at the far end of a jury table stands, reaches into his jacket pocket, and drives a switchblade into the wood beside the murder weapon. The two knives are twins. For a few seconds nobody in the room says anything, and Boris Kaufman’s camera, still positioned a little above the level of the men’s eyes, gives us the tableau as an overhead survey: twelve heads, two blades, a table. Then the questions come, and the man answers them plainly. He went walking the night before, for a couple of hours, through the boy’s neighborhood. He found the knife in a little pawnshop two blocks from the boy’s house. It cost six dollars. Someone reminds him that it is against the law to buy or sell such knives. He agrees. That’s right, he says. I broke the law.

The line is one of the most quoted in the film, and it is almost never quoted for what it says. It is remembered as a flourish, the moment the quiet man reveals that he has been busy, that his doubt has feet and a wallet. But listen to it as a sentence spoken inside a locked room by a juror sworn to decide a capital case on the evidence presented in open court. He has conducted an investigation of his own. He has purchased physical evidence that the defense never offered and the prosecution never saw. He has carried it into the deliberation and displayed it to eleven other men. And he has told them, in so many words, that the errand was itself a crime. Nothing happens. Nothing can happen. Within a few minutes he has proposed a secret ballot, one man has changed his vote, and the deliberation that the film exists to show has begun in earnest. The knife, the confession, and the impunity are the first three things the film establishes about the institution it has chosen to dramatize, and the essay that follows is an attempt to take all three seriously at once.

None of it was in the original. Reginald Rose’s teleplay, broadcast live on CBS’s Studio One on the evening of September 20, 1954, has the second knife, but it cost two dollars, it came from a junk shop around the corner, and nobody mentions the law. Between the broadcast and the shooting of the film, in June and July of 1956 at the Fox Movietone studio in Manhattan, Rose raised the price, moved the shop, and added the exchange about illegality. He had reasons to think of it. In March 1954, a few months before he wrote the teleplay, New York had become the first state to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and possession of switchblades, the result of a Brooklyn campaign against what one of its leaders called the toy that kills. The knife in the film is a product of the same municipal panic that produced the defendant’s record: children’s court, reform school, a stolen car, two arrests for knife fighting, the profile of the mid-fifties juvenile delinquent as the newspapers and the Senate’s subcommittee on the subject had drawn him. So the object that Juror 8 sticks into the table is doubly contraband. It belongs to a category of thing the state had just decided its citizens could not own, and it enters a category of proceeding the state had decided its citizens must conduct without outside help. The film knows both facts. It puts the second one in the mouth of a fellow juror and the confession in the mouth of its hero, and it lets the moment stand as the pivot of the first act.

That is the problem in miniature. 12 Angry Men is celebrated as a defense of a procedure, and its most famous gesture is a breach of that procedure. Fifty years of admirers have handled the contradiction by looking away from it, and a smaller number of skeptics, mostly lawyers, have handled it by writing the film up on charges. Neither response is adequate to what the film actually does, which is to build a room in which the law has arranged not to see, and then to ask what twelve ordinary men make in the dark. The answer, followed through the film’s votes, its objects, its weather, and the strange progress of its camera, is that they make almost everything themselves. The trial supplies them with fragments. The room supplies the rest: a walk timed with a wristwatch, a threat shouted in earnest and then disowned, marks on the side of a nose, a photograph. The verdict that finally leaves the room rests less on what was proved in court than on what happened at the table, and the film’s achievement, its scandal and its optimism, is that it shows the two things as the same event.

The Sentence the Judge Cannot Soften

The film’s first movement is a descent. Kaufman’s camera tilts up the columns of the county courthouse on Foley Square, then finds its way inside, along corridors, through a pair of doors marked with a room number, into a courtroom where a judge (Rudy Bond) is finishing his charge to the jury in the voice of a man reading a menu. He has been listening to a long and ...