8. Um, What If Juror Number 8 Was Wrong? - 12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Angry Men is a movie about what happens when you put 12 men in a room and have them shout insults at each other for nearly two hours. At least, that's much of what Sidney Lumet's classic feels like. But the film is a genuine masterclass in "talky" movies, and a great meditation on the nature of the justice system, and how things aren't always the way we perceive them to be. It might also be a movie about a nutcase who manages to persuade 11 dim-wits to let a guilty man free. Seriously. Over the course of its runtime,
12 Angry Men plays favourites with Juror Number 8, a man named "Davis" played by legendary screen icon Henry Fonda. And the point of the film is that all of the other men in the room are willing to send a young man to the electric chair without really considering the case with the microscopic analysis that Juror Number 8 thinks they should. He eventually convinces all of them that the boy "might be innocent" of murder, and as a group, they decide to vote non-guilty whilst also learning to respect one another. Aw. But wait. As cool and collected as Henry Fonda is here, the cases that he makes for the boy's innocence are never anything but speculative. And a lot of them sound kind of ridiculous. When he convinces the rest of the angry men that there's "reasonable doubt" involved, we expect to find out that, yes, Juror Number 8 was right all along, and that the turn of events he conjures up were in fact correct. But we never do, and there's an extremely high chance that he was wrong... and that his actions have resulted in a murderer being set back on the streets. Obviously, in a case where there is "reasonable doubt," a man shouldn't be convicted. But it's when you consider that each and every one of Juror Number 8's speculations are so flimsy that things get a little blurred. Most of them are so far-reaching, that they don't even qualify for reasonable doubt. There's nothing reasonable about many of the "grabbing for straws" speculations he makes and implants in the mind's of his fellow jurors. The fact that we never find out whether the boy is innocent or not is kind of chilling, and given the somewhat bizarre nature of Fonda's argument, it's likely that he just has a fetish for letting murders go free.