Twelve Angry Men

A detailed Summary of Twelve Angry Men

The feature film twelve angry men is a wonderful example of how twelve individuals work through their differences in the movie and finally emerge as a cohesive unit. The two main characters in the movie are Juror number eight who is Henry Fonda and Juror number three who is Lee .J. Cobb.

In the first scene in the movie the group process is in its embryonic stages with none of the jurors knowing each other. They first argue about how much time they should spend on the case as eleven out of the twelve jurors vote the boy as guilty in the preliminary vote with only Henry Fonda voting the boy as not guilty as he had a reasonable amount of doubt in his mind about the case and wanted to be sure before giving his judgment as the boy would have faced death through the electric chair if pronounced guilty.

The jury needed to be unanimous in their decision therefore Fonda proposed to have a secret vote to see if anyone else changed their mind. Fonda did not vote here as he agreed he would vote the boy guilty if all the rest of the eleven jurors did so also. As it was one of the jurors voted not guilty and the direction of the case turned once again. This was a very important vote

The other main character of the movie - Lee .J. Cobb who is juror number three is extremely angered with the proceedings and the influence juror number eight is having on the decisions of the other jurors that he has a violent outbreak and threatens to kill juror number eight and has to be restrained. We see leadership skills from juror number one here as he is the most businesslike amongst all the jurors and he is the first one to break up a fight when it occurs. Thus it is Juror number one that is mainly responsible for managing conflict that arises within the decision making process. Juror number eleven follows up and asks the other jurors not to take this case personally and be objective about the matter at hand.

We see a lot of different personalities in this movie with each juror having his own distinct personality. To me it seems like juror number seven was the least interested in the case among all the other jurors as he kept on complaining about the fact that jury was taking an excessive amount of time to come to a decision and kept complaining that he was going to miss a ball game to which he had tickets for. He was not the least bit interested that a boy's life is at stake in the case here. Another type of attitude is the one that juror number three has, as he seems to keep arguing with everyone on the jury. He has a very discriminatory type of an attitude towards juror number nine which angers juror number six who then reprimands him ( Cobb) for his actions.

as the movie could have ended here if all the eleven jurors voted guilty as their verdict.

The vote now changes to six

Some common words found in the essay are:
Henry Fonda, Lee Cobb, Joseph Sweeney, Twelve Angry, juror eight, vote changes, favor guilty juror, henry fonda, juror nine, favor guilty, guilty juror, changing mind, juror eight henry, boy guilty, eight henry, eight henry fonda, vote boy guilty, reasonable amount doubt, amount doubt,

Approximate Word count = 1098
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies