The Criterion Collection

The title of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957) demands to be taken literally. Here sit (or, for emphasis, stand) a dozen sober citizens—all of them male, some cowed, some in command, but all angry. A man’s fate rests in their hands. Across their faces run the rage and defeat, the smug self-satisfaction, and the capacity for reflection and retraction that blind and finally bind the nation. And beneath all that are a dozen actors, fretting and fulminating and enjoying the ride: feeding off each other—off all the late-golden-age-of-Hollywood acting charisma boxed up in that magic little room. For audiences everywhere, the decision has long been a unanimous one: on the sole count of providing old-school Hollywood pleasures to the nth degree, we find these twelve men guilty as charged.

At the top of our roll call is 12 Angry Men’s agreeable but often uncomfortable foreman, Martin Balsam, an actor forever to be identified with his gravity-stymieing, backward slash-and-stumble down Norman Bates’s staircase in Psycho. A Tony-winning Method actor nurtured by Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg in the 1940s, Balsam won an Oscar as Jason Robards’s down-to-earth agent/brother in A Thousand Clowns, but some of his best roles were his quirkiest ones. His swishy turn as an “interior decorator” turned burglar in Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes is a particular standout; so is his ex–subway motorman with a telltale sneeze in the original The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Balsam also had a successful career in poliziotteschi (violent Italian cop films) during the 1970s, notably starring in Confessions of a Police Captain alongside Franco Nero; in genre kingpin Fernando Di Leo’s Blood and Diamonds; and—the same year he appeared in Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men—in Antonio Margheriti’s Death Rage, across from Yul Brynner.

The voice of Piglet in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh franchise, John Fiedler was a perennial presence throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s in family-friendly features like The Odd Couple and television sitcoms like the original Bob Newhart Show, where his all-around basket case, Mr. Peterson, was one of psychologist Bob’s regular patients. With a voice that could sound like wet rubbers on linoleum and the visage of a balding field mouse, Fiedler was perfect playing bottled-up nebbishes with a hint of incipient psycho: in a classic Star Trek episode, he even embodied the spirit of Jack the Ripper. The clearly compensatory pipe he puffs at in 12 Angry Men is but another Freudian facet of his symptomatic repertoire.

With a scowl like a squashed gourd and one of the scariest snarls in Hollywood, Lee J. Cobb had been performing on Broadway for over a decade when his world-whipped 1949 incarnation of Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman made him a star of the stage. On-screen, he’d likewise been making memorable noirs like Call Northside 777 and 3-D B flicks like Gorilla at Large for a decade before the seething Oedipal mess he inhabits in 12 Angry Men made him a ubiquitous tough guy at the movie house and on the tube. Of particular note: Cobb as the glowering waterfront union boss Johnny Friendly in fellow “friendly witnesses” Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront; as Gary Cooper’s embittered and psychotic outlaw uncle in Anthony Mann’s ferocious Man of the West (written by 12 Angry Men’s Reginald Rose); and as an Al Capone–esque capo who bludgeons a betrayer to death with a tiny bronze pool cue in Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl.

A supercilious and detail-oriented stock trader ultimately swayed by painstaking reexamination of the evidence in 12 Angry Men, E. G. Marshall specialized in buttoned-down company men. Steel-principled, if sometimes blinkered to the emotional damage unfolding around them, Marshall’s paternalistic legal counsel on The Defenders and noble neurosurgeon on The New Doctors were mainstays of 1960s and early 1970s prime-time television. He was doing Eugene O’Neill on Broadway in the mid-forties, just as his film career was beginning; in 1956, the year before Lumet’s film, Marshall was still working the Great White Way, as Vladimir in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. No matter the decade, when a bullet-headed corporate man, counselor with killer instincts, or cold-blooded captain of industry was called for, Marshall was often on hand, with notable career highlights including legal eagles in The Caine Mutiny and Compulsion, James Fox’s rich and clueless father in Arthur Penn’s incendiary The Chase, and high-ranking Watergate casualty Attorney General John Mitchell in Oliver Stone’s Nixon.

Eons before television’s 1970s sitcom-ization of Neal Simon’s The Odd Couple seemed forever to naturalize him as a New Yorker, Jack Klugman, though born in Philadelphia, was specializing in playing denizens of the Big Apple, like his grown-up slum kid in 12 Angry Men: he could make you believe the city oozed from his every pore. (When I happened to see Klugman outside the West Fourth Street subway station in Manhattan once in the 1980s, it seemed like an everyday encounter with a neighbor.) Best remembered today for his work alongside his lifelong friend Tony Randall in their Emmy-winning Odd Couple roles, and for his later near-decade-long starring stint as an L.A. County medical examiner on Quincy, M.E., Klugman had won an earlier Emmy as well, for his work (opposite series star E. G. Marshall) on the courtroom drama The Defenders.

Edward Binns may have been in more high-quality television programs during (and after) the medium’s golden age than any other actor, beginning with a 1948 appearance in Tennessee Williams’s Portrait of a Madonna on ABC’s distinguished Actor’s Studio. (Binns’s 12 Angry Men costars E. G. Marshall and Martin Balsam had been Actor’s Studio guest stars as well.) A stolid, blue-collar housepainter in Lumet’s film, Binns had played a cop in Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt the year before, and he was often cast for the weary gravitas he could bring to the roles of hardworking men and military professionals: the lived-in, worn-down characters he plays in Patton and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves occupy little screen time yet still come easily to mind. Binns would work again for Lumet, along with Jack Warden, in the director’s 1982 return to the courtroom, The Verdict.

Lovable even when growling, Jack Warden—the jury’s garrulous, sweat-drenched, end-of-the-table holdout—led a knockabout life before joining the military at eighteen; he served as a paratrooper, seeing action in the Battle of the Bulge. Once he became an actor, he played military men in nearly half of the films he made. An Emmy winner who spent much of the early 1950s on television, Warden made his big-screen mark with 12 Angry Men but seemed truly to come into his own in the 1970s, when, to inject a bit of middle-aged bluster into otherwise swinging milieus, he appeared in Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (and was Oscar-nominated for it) and Being There, playing the presidential straight man to Peter Sellers’s green-thumbed idiot savant. In the heat of the ’70s New Hollywood, Warden and Martin Balsam would also reunite, in All the President’s Men.

The Wrong Man himself, Henry Fonda—12 Angry Men’s first last hope for the defendant, and the film’s unflappable proponent of reasonable doubt—had appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s ultra-downbeat tale of American injustice, Manhattan-style, just the year before 12 Angry Men (which Fonda also produced) was released, so his credentials as a crusader against the unjustly accused cast a powerful gleam. The year before that, Fonda (so the legend goes) had been punched in the jaw by John Ford on the set of Mister Roberts; he never again worked with Ford, who had helped define the actor’s very essence in films like Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath. Nineteen fifty-six found Fonda not just imperiled as a jazz bassist mistaken for a bank robber in The Wrong Man but imperious as Count Bezukhov in King Vidor’s War and Peace. But it was 1957 that affixed Fonda’s white hat permanently—or at least until Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West ripped it off.

Joseph Sweeney’s film career appears to have begun in 1918’s Sylvia on a Spree, though the long gaps in his IMDb filmography after that suggest we’ll probably never know the full extent of his screen résumé. He was also a lifelong stage actor who’d once lived in the same rooming house as a young W. C. Fields. Born in 1884 (maybe earlier), Sweeney worked extensively in television, guesting on Arch Obler’s chiller anthology Lights Out and the classic cop comedy Car 54 Where Are You? before appearing in the Studio One TV production of 12 Angry Men, in the role he would so brilliantly reprise in the Lumet version: a rickety but still fiery old bird, so in touch with his own mortality that his eyes seem straining already to “go into the light.”

Another of 12 Angry Men’s later-career best supporting actor Oscar winners (for his sadistic southern patriarch in 1962’s Sweet Bird of Youth), Ed Begley grew up performing in circuses, carnivals, vaudeville, and early radio; the Internet Broadway Database lists him as having appeared in a show called The Red Mill in 1906 (he would have been five). He won a Tony for Inherit the Wind in 1956, shortly before shooting Lumet’s film. The movie’s avatar of racial intolerance, the boorish, nose-honking blowhard Juror 10 seems a natural fit for the actor’s blustery bullheadedness, but he could as easily play the other side of the card, as when his hapless attempt to harmonize the races (as represented by Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan) brings Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow to a spectacularly explosive climax.

As the heavily accented European watchmaker who makes a point of his perfect English grammar in 12 Angry Men, versatile character actor George Voskovec might make you think that after seeing him here, you’d recognize him anywhere. Not so. Voskovec, born Jiri Wachsmann in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), could seem radically different from part to part: his slightly flamboyant psychic in The Boston Strangler a world and a subtly shaded accent away from his brief turn as call girl extraordinaire Liz Taylor’s shrink in BUtterfield 8. A theatrical pioneer, political satirist, film star, and lyricist of some 300 pop songs in Prague in the 1920s and ’30s, Voskovec was a relentlessly creative man, writing, directing and producing for stage, screen, and television throughout his career. Voskovec did Shakespeare with John Gielgud, played Otto Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank in London, and won an Obie (in a tie with Jason Robards for The Iceman Cometh) for his Uncle Vanya in 1956.

Robert Webber, 12 Angry Men’s proto–Don Draper—a boy in a gray flannel suit with a penchant for doodling while on duty and an expensive uptown haircut—rounds out our jury pool. Webber’s defensively flip jurist is actually one of the most passive of the panel members—scarcely the kind of guy who’d gleefully stub out lit cigarettes on the soles of Julie Harris’s feet, as Webber does in Harper, or terrorize Mexican working girls, as he does as Gig Young’s hit-man partner (and ostensible lover) in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Though a later-career specialist in psychopaths, Webber was a well-rounded actor who appeared as Liz Taylor’s ex-paramour in Vincente Minnelli’s oft (and unjustly) maligned The Sandpiper and across from Dean Martin in The Silencers and Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen in the 1960s; as a series of cops and professional killers in Italian crime flicks during the 1970s; and as Cybill Shepherd’s father on television’s Moonlighting in the 1980s.

Chuck Stephens lives and teaches in Nashville, Tennessee.