Here are some questions and prompts about 12 Angry Men for your reflection:
Socratic leadership emerges as a counterintuitive but powerful tool. His earnest reservations, rather than his earnest presumption of guilt, give energy and force to his questions and cause the other jurors to think more critically and examine their own assumptions. What he doesn’t know is every bit as important as what he does know. 8’s argument arises not from overbearing, omniscient certitude but rather from intellectual humility. It is a good reminder that leadership doesn’t require a title. Yet he persuades his peers to reconsider their initial judgment of the accused. 8 (Henry Fonda) has no official authority beyond that of the other jurors. In particular, it is a case study in Socratic leadership-that is, leadership by means of asking a succession of provocative, probing questions that compel people to rethink their assumptions and beliefs. The 1997 remake is good but not as good.)įilmed in black-and-white to emphasize the binary decision any jury must render, often against myriad shades of gray, 12 Angry Men is an extraordinary movie for leadership. (Incidentally, we have a strong preference for the original, 1957 production of this movie. (To be sure, they were routinely excused on grounds of their “special obligation as the center of home and family life.”) Some high schools are producing the play nowadays under the PC-approved title 12 Angry Jurors, but the testosterone-teeming competitive jockeying among twelve men brings a special tension to the proceedings. Until then no movie had explored the dynamics of a jury deliberation.Īs the title implies, all twelve jurors are men despite the fact that women had been serving on juries in New York, where the movie takes place, for twenty years beforehand. The screenwriter, Reginald Rose, got the idea while serving on a jury himself.
Scarcely 90 minutes long, it is a taut and powerful story of jury deliberations in the case of an 18-year-old defendant charged with homicide. Marshall, Jack Klugmanġ2 Angry Men is a classic of filmmaking.
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