A scene from 12 Angry Men

This weekend, I watched Fail-Safe for the first time all the way through. My trivia brain already had a few things stored about the movie, but very few. I knew it was in black and white, just like Dr. Strangelove, the other famous movie about nuclear war from 1964. I knew Walter Matthau played a creepy, pro nuclear war professor, and I must have seen scenes from the film while flipping through cable TV back in the day, because I knew there were scenes with Henry Fonda as the president and a young looking Larry Hagman as the guy who would translate what the Russian premier would say. The scenes were in a nearly blank room, just the two actors. Hagman is now associated with I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas, but this is a much different role and he and Fonda are so good together.

I don't love the film the way I love Strangelove, but director Sidney Lumet made a lot of interesting choices. The one that is really striking is there is no incidental music in the film. I wracked my brain trying to think of other films without music, but I had to swallow my pride and look the information up. Someone I just met on Twitter, Allison Stern-Dunyak, brought up a few and Lumet's name kept popping up. I had forgotten there was no score in Network, and I hadn't seen his films The Offence or Dog Day Afternoon, the latter is a gap in my education I plan to fix. But I most certainly did see an earlier film in Lumet's career that had no musical cues, 12 Angry Men. 

It was one of my earliest memory self-assignments to memorize the names of all the actors, but I didn't think to link them to their seat numbers. I just saw a scene on YouTube, so it's not all that impressive to list the names right now, but there are two actors in the cast who didn't get quite as much work as the rest. So as a kid, I made an effort to remember Joseph Sweeney as the old guy who is the second vote for not guilty as George Voscovec as the foreign born juror. The other ten actors are better known, the big star being Henry Fonda, and the rest would go to lots of roles in film and TV like Lee J. Cobb, Edward Binns (also in Fail-Safe), Jack Klugman, John Fiedler, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, E.G. Marshall, Robert Webber and Ed Begley.

Now that I have gone through the winding path that got me to thinking about 12 Angry Men, I focused on one scene, Ed Begley Sr. big star turn.

This was the liberal dream in mid-century America, and it rings completely hollow today. In a room of twelve white men, only one of them is a flat-out racist and when he stops talking in code and just uses the kind of racist language we hear from our president. (At the start of the film, we see the defendant. Since the film takes place in New York in the 1950s, I assume his brown skin is meant to tell us he is Puerto Rican.) All of the other eleven shun him completely. He is later so ashamed he votes to acquit.

We know the truth today. A racist like this would stand his ground and this would be an 11-1 vote, which back then would have meant a hung jury. Or even more likely, one of the other jurors - all white and all male - would have backed him up when he went into his racist diatribe.

It is still one of my favorite films, but looking back at it from the era of Trump, it's every bit as big a fantasy as Creature from the Black Lagoon, and more's the pity.