12 Angry Men

A detailed Summary of 12 Angry Men

The movie 12 Angry Men depicts a typical scene today: twelve jury members meeting to discuss a case presented to them and determine guilt or innocence of a young man accused of killing his own father. Usually the jury room is a place for discussion and debate, but the evidence has swayed all but one of the jurors into voting guilty. The one juror, Henry Fonda, is unsure of the defendant's guilt or innocence himself, even though his fellow jury members all disagree with him. The movie proceeds to tell the tale of how Henry Fonda uses excellent communication skills to sway the jury into actually thinking for themselves instead of thinking in the group's best interest and effectively voting that the young man was innocent.

It is quite obvious that the jury members are in agreement as they have all eight symptoms of an afflicted group. The first symptom that the group has is the illusion of invulnerability. At the beginning of the movie, all the jurors really did not care that the defendant was going to be put to death. In fact, the garage owner and the messenger service owner seemed to think it was very fair that the boy was going to be killed. The first point that Henry Fonda worked on trying to break down was the fact that

Direct pressure is a very obvious symptom of the agreement. In particular, the messenger service owner and the garage owner, some of the elder men in the group, constantly try to bash Fonda and his points into the ground. Fonda is approached in the bathroom by some of the gentlemen, and they try to convince him let it go and just vote guilty so everyone can go on with their lives. Despite all this pressure, Fonda still continues to determine if there is a reasonable doubt.

The easiest symptom to spot in the movie is the negative stereotyped views of the defendant. It was automatically assumed that the person was a horrible human being because what part of town he was from and because of this, everyone was positive that he committed the murder. They automatically assumed that the kid was not abused by his father because they where sure he was lying. The kid was also stereotyped as being young and immature, "just like all the kids out there today". It is pretty easy to vote guilty for someone when all you see and talk about are his negative aspects.

The jury also believed that they were acting as a moral group. In the beginning, all the jurors felt that the defendant had committed an immoral crime, something which all of them were prepared to send him to die for. They felt that he deserved death for his actions, and that they were acting completely right even though they still had doubts to his guilt, because they felt it was their job to keep the defendant out of society to the benefit of mankind.

This film does also hit a few types of people, two for the most part. The first is fathers who have bad relations with their sons. The director or the writer might have hade some tension with their father and wanted to display a character on screen that was so upset at his son, that instead of trying to talk to him, he takes it out on a boy that is close to his son's age. The second is the lower class of society. This film sympathizes with this class and tries to let the audience know that just because you are poor, doesn't mean you are bad. Another thought is that the government is on the same side as the lower class and will be there to help them out. This is shown by the simple fact that the jury (gove

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Approximate Word count = 1507
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies