In 1957, Sidney Lumet directed his first film, 12 Angry Men. I put off seeing it for a long time, but finally made time for it last night, and now I wish I had seen it sooner. It is that good.

Barely a minute of the film takes place outside the jury room. At the beginning we hear enough of the jury instructions to note that a guilty verdict in this case will result in mandatory execution of the accused. At the end, it seems like maybe the director just couldn't quite let go, or perhaps Henry Fonda insisted that his character, unlike all of the others, should have a name. If so, it was a mistake, because I've already forgotten the name, and the movie could have easily ended with the jurors walking out of the jury room together.

There was one camera technique that was obtrusive; occasionally the camera would focus on a particular juror in such close-up that it made me feel uncomfortable. This was particularly noticeable with the old man, juror #9. The rest of the camera technique, however, was flawless. Incredibly long shots that panned the entire room and seemed to last for minutes at a time, camera setups that seemed to start off-center but ended up being just right by the time various jurors had walked around a bit, and just the right edits here and there — it was all extremely well-done. There was one scene where one of the speakers was off-screen, but only one in a drama with twelve actors all talking quite a bit is pretty amazing.

But the cinematography isn't the main point of this film. It was made in 1957, and we've advanced the state of the art quite a bit since then.

I knew something of the basic idea of the movie before watching. One man out of a jury of twelve slowly convinces the entire rest of the jury to change their collective vote from "guilty" to "not guilty." So as the evidence was trickled out a bit at a time during the deliberations, I kept track of it in order to make my own determination of guilt or innocence. Full credit goes to the writer, Reginald Rose, for setting me up and then knocking me down.

I witnessed a mock trial held at a law school once that taught me a bit about the ideas of legal guilt or innocence, and I'm not so naive to think that one can extrapolate from an artificially-created screenplay into real life, but I have to say that I was convinced during the course of the movie to switch my own vote from "guilty" to "not guilty." In the end, I still think that the defendant committed the crime. By the civil-court standard of "a preponderance of evidence," I have little doubt that the case presented would have resulted in a "guilt" verdict. But the deck was stacked just a little bit, because the standard was "beyond a reasonable doubt," and there was a mandatory death sentence hanging over the defendant's head. It is no simply thing, sending an eighteen-year-old to the chair, and that, combined with the doubts raised by first Juror #8 and then by others, did the trick.