Critical Reception and Legacy (12 Angry Men) 12 Angry Men (1957)

The 1957 reviews were strong, the box office was weak

12 Angry Men opened on April 13, 1957, distributed by United Artists, in a release pattern aimed at major-city engagements rather than wide saturation. The reviews were uniformly strong. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times praised the film's intensity and Sidney Lumet (in 12 Angry Men)'s direction:

"The result is a picture so engrossing that it goes through its 95 minutes of fine intensity without once losing the audience. Mr. Lumet has come from television to make his first feature film with the assurance and skill of a veteran. Boris Kaufman (in 12 Angry Men)'s photography... uses the limited setting of the jury room with imagination and force." — Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (April 15, 1957)

Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic called the picture "the best courtroom drama since Twelve O'Clock High" — a slightly mischievous comparison, since Henry Fonda (in 12 Angry Men) had not been in Twelve O'Clock High — and praised Cobb's "painful, accurate" Juror 3.

The box office, however, was disappointing. Domestic gross was approximately $1 million on a negative cost of approximately $337,000. United Artists had hoped for a larger return on the prestige investment. The picture broke even on theatrical release only after international and television sales. (wikipedia)

The Berlin Bear and three Academy Award nominations

The film won the Golden Bear at the 1957 Berlin International Film Festival, the festival's top prize. It received three Academy Award nominations — Best Picture, Best Director (Lumet), Best Adapted Screenplay (Reginald Rose) — and lost all three to The Bridge on the River Kwai. Lumet was 32 years old; the Best Director nomination for a feature debut was rare in the studio era and remained so. He would not be nominated again until Dog Day Afternoon eighteen years later.

The film's reputation grew on television and in classrooms

12 Angry Men's afterlife was made by television. United Artists licensed it to network and syndicated television in the early 1960s, and by the mid-1960s it was an annual fixture on prime-time movie slots. American high schools, civics curricula, and law schools picked it up as a teaching text — there are now more than fifty years of trial-advocacy courses, jury-deliberation seminars, and courtroom-procedure classes that use the film as a primary case study. Roger Ebert's 2002 "Great Movies" essay recognized this institutional life:

"It's a film for adults, about adults, and it never resorts to easy answers. The boy on trial may or may not be guilty; the film never tells us. The point is that the jury did its job, and that, in the deliberation room, the system worked." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times — "Great Movies" (2002)

The 1997 Showtime remake and Sidney Lumet's response

In 1997, Showtime broadcast a remade 12 Angry Men, directed by William Friedkin from a Reginald Rose (in 12 Angry Men) teleplay, with Jack Lemmon as Juror 8, George C. Scott as Juror 3, James Gandolfini as Juror 6, Tony Danza as Juror 7, and Edward James Olmos as Juror 11. The remake racially diversified the cast — four of the twelve jurors were Black — and was generally well-received as television, though most critics judged it inferior to the 1957 original.

"The Friedkin remake is interesting as television and unnecessary as cinema. The 1957 version got there first, with a cast and a director who would never assemble in one room again." — Tom Shales, The Washington Post (August 1997)

The Library of Congress preserved it in 2007

In 2007, the Library of Congress added 12 Angry Men to the National Film Registry, citing it as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." It was Lumet's third film to be added, after Network and Dog Day Afternoon. The American Film Institute placed it at #87 on their original 1998 "100 Years... 100 Movies" list and #2 on their 2008 "10 Top 10" list of courtroom dramas (behind To Kill a Mockingbird).

"12 Angry Men is the film I show my law students more than any other. The reason is simple: it teaches reasonable doubt better than any treatise. You watch it, and you understand the standard. You don't have to read about it." — Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker (2014)

The film is taught in every law school

Trial-advocacy professors have written extensively about 12 Angry Men as a teaching text. The Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, and most state bar publications have published essays on the film's accuracy and pedagogical value. Critics within the legal community have been more measured — several scholars, including Phoebe Ellsworth and Reid Hastie, have argued that the film romanticizes the deliberation process and underrepresents the role of irrational factors in real jury behavior.

"The film is honest about the bigotry, the fatigue, and the personal grievances inside the room. What it romanticizes is the response. Real juries do not have a Juror 8. The film's argument is what would happen if they did." — Phoebe Ellsworth, University of Michigan Law Review (1989)

The film has been parodied, referenced, and re-staged in popular culture so often that the references have become free-standing — The Simpsons devoted an episode to it, Tiny Toon Adventures parodied it, Family Guy and King of the Hill have done jury-deliberation episodes that quote its blocking. Korean director Park Chan-wook cited it as a structural model for Joint Security Area (2000). The Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov made his own 12 (2007), a near-three-hour adaptation that updates the case to a Chechen boy accused of murdering his Russian stepfather.

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