Twelve Angry Men

“12 Angry Men,” 1954 TV performance produced for the CBS series of dramas that ran under the label “Westinghouse Studio One”
Reviewed by Fay Blackburn, Oct. 16, 2020

(COPPER CLAPPER NOTE: Fay’s review of the TV version of “12 Angry Men” refers to a review in The Wall Street Journal written by Terry Teachout. Teachout’s review is printed after Fay’s.)

Thanks for this link as I am interested in reading after watching the TV production the other night, which I think it is no match for the film version.

The characters hardly progress in the TV hour ... there is no delving into the jurors' back stories so that you understand why they first voted "guilty" and then changed to "not guilty." The changeovers were pretty quick without much deliberation amongst the jurors.

In the TV version, it's not revealed why the Franchot Tone character, the last holdout for a “guilty” verdict, is so angered and prejudiced by the actions of the defendant, a son accused of murdering his father; in the film, you find that the same juror, played by Lee J. Cobb, has an estranged and painful relationship with his own son.

Also not revealed is why the Edward Arnold character is so racist. If I remember right, in the film it is revealed that he had some sort of altercation with Hispanics in his neighborhood. (I'd have to watch the film again to be positive about the details of each juror's prejudice for a “guilty” verdict.)

Bob Cummings' character, the juror who stands alone against the 11 “guilty” votes, does more walking around the room and gazing out the window than trying to convince the others that there is reasonable doubt. I remember in the movie Henry Fonda, leaning into the table of jurors and homing in on every detail of the case until the others saw the holes in the evidence.

I further remember the film’s making you feel the tension with dialogue interjected about the heat, and how some jurors sweat and sweat because it was such a hot day outside. I didn't feel as much discourse and tension in the TV show.

And the ending is really shortchanged, with Franchot Tone switching without much argument and just the comment "All right." I'm wondering now how the play reads.

So, my preference is the film version of this play, which I have seen once done on stage in Vancouver. I don't remember what year, but it was at the community theater housed in the old brick church on Daniels Street. Mike Heywood (formerly a star reporter and editorial page editor at The Columbian) was in it, not sure who else we might have known in the cast. But I am sure the play lasted longer than an hour.

Cheers, Fay

(And now, the Terry Teachout piece from The Wall Street Journal …)

‘Twelve Angry Men’: First Deliberations

The initial 1954 teleplay outshines the movie and stage adaptations that followed.

By Terry Teachout

Oct. 8, 2020

Most people know “Twelve Angry Men,” in which Reginald Rose dramatized the contentious deliberations of a New York jury, from Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film version, whose screenplay was written by Rose and which featured a top-flight ensemble cast led by Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall and Jack Klugman. More recently, the Roundabout Theatre Company brought Rose’s stage adaptation of “Twelve Angry Men” to Broadway in 2004 for a successful run. To this day it is a regional-theater staple, as well as the sixth most frequently staged full-length play in American high schools (where it is performed with women in the cast and is known as “Twelve Angry Jurors”).

But many fans of the film are unaware that “Twelve Angry Men” began life as a live-TV drama directed by Franklin J. Schaffner that aired on CBS’s “Studio One” in 1954. It ranks alongside Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty,” Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” Abby Mann’s “Judgment at Nuremberg,” JP Miller’s “Days of Wine and Roses” and Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight” as one of a small number of live-TV dramas from the ’50s that were turned into artistically and commercially successful movies.

I mention all this because it is now possible to watch the live-TV version of “Twelve Angry Men” on YouTube, meticulously restored from a surviving kinescope film of the original 1954 telecast—and you know what? It’s better than the movie. A lot better.

The biggest difference between the small- and big-screen “Twelve Angry Men” is that on TV the teleplay runs for 60 very tightly wrought minutes (including commercials and credits). Within that span of time, we watch a dozen jurors wrangle over the fate of a 19-year-old slum kid who is on trial for murdering his father. At first, only one man, Juror No. 8, believes there to be reasonable doubt of his guilt. The rest are more than ready to convict him, with Juror No. 3, an aggressive, opinionated businessman, leading the charge. But as the group deliberates, Juror No. 8 patiently brings his fellow colleagues around one by one to his point of view, and the young man is set free.

That’s a great plot, and in the film version, Rose and Lumet blew it up to a playing time of 96 minutes. To be sure, it doesn’t feel as obviously padded as does Delbert Mann’s 1955 big-screen adaptation of “Marty,” but once you’ve seen the original hour-long telecast, you’ll be startled by how fast-moving and dramatically taut it is—a tautness heightened still further by the fact that the “Studio One” version was performed live and in real time. As a result, the original “Twelve Angry Men” makes an impression strikingly similar to that of a stage play.

No less significant is the casting. In the film, Henry Fonda, dressed in a knight-in-shining-armor white suit, plays Juror No. 8, telegraphing his everyman-style nobility in the most painfully predictable way imaginable. As for the monstrous Juror No. 3, he is Lee J. Cobb, who is no less self-evidently the heavy—a role that he played in countless other movies. Yes, they were both great actors, but their performances in “Twelve Angry Men” are on the nose, devoid of subtlety to a near-cartoonish degree.

On TV, by contrast, Juror No. 8 is played by Robert Cummings, a handsome, affable man who is now mainly remembered for having starred in flyweight sitcoms. But Cummings had also appeared in leading-man roles in such A-list Hollywood dramas as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” and “Dial M for Murder” and Sam Wood’s “Kings Row,” and in “Twelve Angry Men” he shows that he was up to the challenge of a dead-serious part. He is, in fact, vastly more believable than Fonda, whose way-too-good-to-be-true performance makes the film feel preachy.

In an even bigger reversal, Juror No. 3 is played by Franchot Tone, a Hollywood star (he is best remembered for playing opposite Clark Gable and Charles Laughton in “Mutiny on the Bounty”) who by 1954 had made the shift into middle-aged character roles. Tone has all of Cobb’s forcefulness without any of his over-the-top predictability, and his confrontations with Cummings are all the more compelling as a result.

Those who speak in hushed tones of the “First Golden Age of Television” tend to forget that TV programming in the ’50s consisted for the most part of low-budget mysteries, sitcoms, westerns and wrestling. Even the best live-TV anthology series like “Studio One,” “Philco Television Playhouse” and “Playhouse 90” aired more than their share of standard-issue fare. But when they were good, they were extraordinarily fine—and “Twelve Angry Men” proves it.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author of “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.