When Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) held out against eleven jurors in 12 Angry Men, he was viewed as “open-minded.” When a juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial held out, the defense told the judge he was refusing to apply the law, and the other eleven jurors spent seven days trying to wear him down. Nearly 70 years after the most beloved courtroom film of all time was released (though I, like Armond White, find that admiration absurd), which of these holdouts ought we to admire? Hollywood teaches us to respect the wrong one.
To refresh the movie’s premise: A man has been stabbed to death, and the jury must decide whether his 18-year-old son did it. The son admits he bought a switchblade after his father hit him; an identical knife was found in the father’s chest the same day. The downstairs neighbor testifies that he heard the son shout that he would kill his father, then a thud, then saw the son run down the stairs. A woman across the street swears she watched the stabbing. The son says the knife fell out of his pocket on the way to a double feature whose titles he could not name, at a theater where no one saw him. He has a checkered history: throwing a rock at a teacher at 10, reform school at 15, and arrests for mugging and knife-fighting (twice). That’s the record the film asks twelve men (and the audience) to doubt.
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