Perfect Strangers bests the overrated 12 Angry Men.
The inconclusive Lindsay Clancy child-murder trial has revived recognition of the 1957 courthouse drama 12 Angry Men for all the wrong reasons, especially the absurd proposition that it is one of the greatest films of all time.
This is an unsurprising occurrence at a time when political rhetoric overtakes logic and taste in favor of emotion. The “believe all women” rhetoric deployed during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh (on the basis of witness Christine Blasey Ford’s unfounded accusations) became the unspoken insistence of news media that recently aired complaints by several disgruntled Clancy jurors, mostly women.
12 Angry Men’s most obvious flaw is screenwriter Reginald Rose’s awkward premise: An all-white, all-male jury is charged to decide a New York City murder trial. It contrasted with the more credible 1950 film Perfect Strangers, a love story concentrated on the frisson between male and female jurors.
Rose’s pre-feminist conceit still holds appeal for some these days who like to oversimplify moral issues in terms of ideological favor. 12 Angry Men’s appearance (first as a 1954 television drama) responded to liberal agita over the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings — the same blacklist concerns that Arthur Miller disguised in The Crucible. Miller used issues of free speech and free association, as well as skeptical revisionist history, to distract from HUAC’s investigation of communist infiltration of American government. The same questions about communist encroachment have now reappeared in contemporary political turmoil — in many cases with a vengeance, and met with denial.
As Sidney Lumet’s debut feature film, 12 Angry Men has acquired an aura of urban authenticity (a backward reflection of Lumet’s New York–centric films Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A sold by parochial film reviewers) partially due to Boris Kaufman’s striking black-and-white photography, which gave the interior-set drama an intense glow. Lumet’s aesthetic also stresses black-and-white moral simplicity, the better to concentrate politicized readings of the trial and the sociological interplay of characters who represent American patriarchy.
It is this preconceived moral design that connects 12 Angry Men to the angry female Clancy jurors who have publicly denounced a fellow juror — a male — for not sharing their feminist sympathy. If 12 Angry Men was a more challenging film, it would not be so easily evoked by the Clancy juror spectacle. The esteemed David Mamet wrote an introduction for a reprint of Rose’s script that noted its contrast between an abstract “America of them” and a practical “America of us.” This us-vs.-them argument is central to the liberal mentality that the malcontents of the Clancy jury manipulate.
What if they had modeled themselves on Perfect Strangers, in which democratic plurality (also filmed in black-and-white) is preserved in the emotional colors of nonsegregated sexual experience? In Strangers, Ginger Rogers portrays a lone juror, estranged from her husband, one of at first five women from the voir dire, then down to four women and eight men. Her independence resists stereotype: “I’m a juror, not a woman.” She challenges a blowhard with the rebuke “Your opinionations don’t sway me one little bit!” When told there’s no such word as “opinionations,” she repeats it anyway. So much for the rigged arguments of Rose’s speeches and Lumet’s pressure-cooker intensity. Perfect Strangers was written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, capturing the wit of their 1920s stage classic The Front Page, the definitive satire of media manipulation — which would apply well to media coverage of the Clancy-jury squabbles.
Falling back on the sentimentality of 12 Angry Men prevents Millennial viewers from recognizing the perverse bias in media accounts of the Clancy jury. CBS News, specifically, favors the discontented female jurors’ perspective to such a prejudicial degree that the case’s lone dissenting juror has been doxxed and vilified — denied the heroic stature that Henry Fonda brought to the lone-holdout-juror role in 12 Angry Men. Fonda asserts: “It’s always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. Wherever you run into it, prejudice always obscures the truth.” That wisdom also indicts feminist prejudice by jurors and the media.
Perfect Strangers comes closer to the moral quandary of the anti-lynching film The Ox-Bow Incident (once a staple of American justice narratives, a key to Fonda’s Old Hollywood liberalism). Lumet punches hard (part of his TV background) but can’t match Hecht and MacArthur’s unromantic cynicism. After a day-in-the-life opening, Lumet settles for a pretense of microcosmic, nonbinary democracy (including separate restrooms for men and women). He gets “cinematic” only during a hand-vote montage and when he uses a dissolve (visualizing two ideas at once) to show the “underprivileged” suspect on trial.
12 Angry Men is overrated in the streaming-content era that fancies it is the golden age of television, mistaking the over-articulated dialogue (which Lumet’s stage-trained actors speak well) for Writers’ Room sophistication. Yet 12 Angry Men never speaks to our moment, as when the Perfect Strangers judge laments, “This case has been tried for weeks now in newspapers and radio, there’s nothing the court can or would want to do about that.” His promise to “guarantee a fair and impartial trial . . . protect you from any pressure by outside influences” points toward the complex threat of ideological influences that jurors refuse to let go of.
Would contemporary screenwriters and filmgoers who admire 12 Angry Men be able to resist its woke appeal? Ironically, Perfect Strangers was a product of socially conscious Warner Bros., same as Storm Warning, an anti-KKK drama that was also a Ginger Rogers vehicle. The romantic-comedy premise equals existential fate without the Lumet film’s sanctimoniousness; it’s more like a legalese Brief Encounter. In every way that matters, revealing our personal and societal obligations, Perfect Strangers is the superior film.
