26 APRIL 1957, Page 17

True Deliverance

f• 0. Theatre.) THE 12 Angry Men are members ik 41 of an American jury that will send an eighteen-year-old boy to the electric chair (no recommendation for mercy, the judge rules) if they can all agree that the extremely damning evidence calls for a unani- mous vote of guilty. Before they file out to deliberate we catch a glimpse of the boy's face. Some science-fiction dream of human evolution, he looks: chin so small as to be almost extinct, mouth and teeth crushed into a fragility half rabbit, half rosebud, and enormous lemur-like eyes where intelligence gazes out unbacked by any strength or purpose. A haunting face and a brave one to have used, for it makes us under- stand, to start off with, the jurors' conviction of guilt. They settle down to vote, so certain of the out- come that there is no tenseness, even; no pre- liminary discussion. The' boy was heard by neighbours threatening his father that night; one witness heard the killing through the floor, another saw it through a window; the knife was identified as the boy's and he had no satisfactory alibi. Yet one vote reads not guilty. Through a stifling afternoon, when the whole sky outside is gathering itself for a colossal thunderstorm, the jurors argue, and the boy's life becomes a ball tossed between every sort of prejudice and con- viction, character and motive. We never move out of the one room: there is no flashback, no palliative reminiscence of expansion, only the twelve men revealed for what they are, worth, both (as it were) horizontally and vertically— as moral beings and as human personalities; that is, the moral level at which they would come if you were to lay them out in a competitive pile, like carpets, and the relative amount of space they would take up if presence and capacity were measurable, like jam-pots. And a man may be high in the pile yet small among the jam-pots, or vice versa: here we see it all.

Extraordinarily intimately we get to know them—their backgrounds, their mannerisms, their tiresome or engaging ways, their physical tricks of voice or gesture, above all their outlook on human life. For the first time 1 understood in practice what people who have lived under Fascism mean when they say the world is divided into Fascists and non-Fascists, or into those with a respect for human life and those without it; for at a deep and unobtrusive level this is a political film, a propagandist piece in the most humane of terms, that gives us two points of view, and therefore two sorts of action, to choose from. For basically, however much they differ in argument and even in decision, the jurors are divided between the nine who believe in the seriousness of what they are doing, to whom the boys life matters, and the three to whom it means nothing. Of these three one argues that slums being breeding grounds for crime they may as well kill off another slum boy who must obviously be a bad lot; the second hates boys because he has a son he has quarrelled with and welcomes a chance of slapping back at him; and the third simply wants to get to his baseball game and will vote any way that seems to get him fastest out of the room. The minor behaviour of the three can be called Fascist just as surely, for once human life loses its dignity, the minor decencies go too: it is these three who rant and shout, who try to hustle discussion, who are rude to an old man and offensive to an immigrant, whose racial and social hackles are up at every point. The acting is so good from everyone that we forget we are looking at actors, which is the best compli- ment you can give this sort of acting. Only Henry Fonda, the basically good man of them all, is to my mind just a trifle smug, a shade too conscien- tious and missionary. He is associate producer too of this remarkable film, which has Sidney Lumet, a television man, for director, and Reginald Rose responsible for story and script.

ISABEL QUIGLY