Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)

Twelve Angry Men makes me feel great, and I'll gladly watch it again and again until the day I die, but I find myself thinking it more frothy than I used to, a liberal feel-good fantasy movie.

Of course, who doesn't want to feel good about the idea that justice will be done by democracy, that faith in the human individual can overcome the indifference of the institutions of justice, that a good conscience can make a difference even in the most difficult of situations, that twelve men locked in a room will come, after a little shouting and a few tears, to the right decision?

And what, I asked myself as I watched it again last week, and the shot at the start of the film in which the boy's anxious face dissolves into the empty jury room, what if we take the film as a fantasy that justice will be done - on the part of the boy himself as well as for us?

But this strikes me as a really uncinematic film, not just in its theatrical restriction to the jury room (and I was struck on this occasion by the script's continual insistence that we should imagine the scene of crime, and of the witnesses, imagine ourself looking out of the window, hearing the EL Train, and so on. What if the boy did do it, though? What, more importantly, if we were to see him doing it - or, conversely, to see that he didn't do it? How would our faith in the image, or our suspicion of it, react with the questions that we're invited to have about his guilt or his innocence?