Twelve Angry Men essays

Twelve Angry Men essays The feature film twelve angry men is a wonderful example of how twelve individuals work through their differences in the movie and finally emerge as a cohesive unit. The two main characters in the movie are Juror number eight who is Henry Fonda and Juror number three who is Lee .J. Cobb. In the first scene in the movie the group process is in its embryonic stages with none of the jurors knowing each other. They first argue about how much time they should spend on the case as eleven out of the twelve jurors vote the boy as guilty in the preliminary vote with only Henry Fonda voting the boy as not guilty as he had a reasonable amount of doubt in his mind about the case and wanted to be sure before giving his judgment as the boy would have faced death through the electric chair if pronounced guilty. The jury needed to be unanimous in their decision therefore Fonda proposed to have a secret vote to see if anyone else changed their mind. Fonda did not vote here as he agreed he would vote the boy guilty if all the rest of the eleven jurors did so also. As it was one of the jurors voted not guilty and the direction of the case turned once again. This was a very important vote as the movie could have ended here if all the eleven jurors voted guilty as their verdict. Another conflict arose here amongst the jury when they all stated to blame juror number five for changing his vote as he like the accused boy was from the slums himself and had a very defensive view about people from the slums. This was not the case at all as it was juror number nine (Joseph Sweeney) who had changed his vote. This is where we see changes emerging within the jury. The vote now changes to nine to three in favor of guilty with juror number five changing his mind. We start seeing the influence juror number eight Henry Fonda has on the other members of the jury as he begins to ...