Creepshow

Anticipation was high among horror fans when it was announced that three giants of the genre were going to collaborate together on a film. Author Stephen King, director George Romero and makeup effects wizard Tom Savini decided to pay tribute to the classic EC horror comic books from the 1950s with an anthology film called Creepshow (1982). Coming off the personally fulfilling, but commercial failure of Knightriders (1981), I’m sure Romero was eager to move on to something else and hooking up with King made sense. The two men had originally met over the possibility of collaborating on an adaptation of the author’s novel Salem’s Lot, but when the film rights were sold off to television, Romero moved on.

Making a horror anthology was a bit of a risky gamble at the time. They were all the rage in the 1970s with Hammer and Amicus cranking out films like The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), and From Beyond the Grave (1973), but by the end of the decade they had fallen out of favor. King and Romero wanted to bring these kinds of films back while also celebrating the horror comic books, like House of Mystery and The Vault of Horror that they grew up enjoying as kids. The project was given a decent budget and populated with a mix of up-and-coming movie stars and veteran character actors. While receiving only mixed reviews, it was a sleeper hit.

Creepshow is bookended by a boy (Joe King) being chastised by 1980s horror movie mainstay Tom Atkins for reading horror comic books. The overbearing patriarch throws his son’s issue of Creepshow in the trash and the rest of the film depicts various stories from its pages.

The first story is “Father’s Day” that sees a family of wealthy snobs waiting for their Aunt Bedelia Grantham (Viveca Lindfors), the rich matriarch who is rumored to have murdered her father, Nathan (Jon Lormer) on, what else, Father’s Day. Nathan was a real piece of work, angrily demanding his cake over and over until, out of frustration, Bedelia brains him with an ashtray. It’s Father’s Day again and Nathan (John Amplas) rises from the grave demanding his cake once more. The undead patriarch, of course, evokes Romero’s zombie films, but Tom Savini’s makeup isn’t a rehash of Dawn of the Dead (1979). The look of undead Nathan is in keeping with the exaggerated style of the old EC comic books.

Romero hits us right up front with all kinds of attention-grabbing style: skewed camera angles, garish Giallo lighting (saturating shots in red or blue lighting) and employing split-screen action like the panels in a comic book. He even evokes Night of the Living Dead (1968) ever so slightly when we see Bedelia visit her father’s grave; the cemetery initially bathed in warm, late afternoon light, soon becomes ominously atmospheric.

There is a nice mix of comedy and dread with the former coming from a fantastic moment where we get to see “serious actor” Ed Harris grooving out to some cheesy music with his wife (Elizabeth Regan). I can’t get enough of seeing him dancing so awesomely badly to a cheesy ‘80s song. With the exception of Harris, the rest of the Grantham clan are a bunch of vain, selfish, obnoxious bluebloods that deserve what’s coming to them, which makes their comeuppance at the hands of Nathan all the more satisfying.

“The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” is easily the weakest story in Creepshow as Stephen King, in an act of unfortunate hubris, casts himself as the eponymous Jordy, a stereotypical dumb yokel who foolishly touches a fallen meteorite and begins sprouting a strange, green moss-like substance that mutates into wild vegetation all over his body. Before you can say Swamp Thing, Jordy and his place are overwhelmed with lush green vegetation. Where the other segments achieve the right mix of horror and humor, this one goes too far over to the comedy side and comes across as too cartoonish.

King’s “acting” is straight out of an Ed Wood movie – strictly amateur hour and not in a it’s-so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. This segment is essentially a one-man show and King just isn’t talented enough to pull it off. Romero does the best he can to keep things interesting visually (Jordy’s place is a marvel of set design), and Savini’s make-up job on King makes you wish that he had done the effects work on Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing (1982).

Fortunately, Creepshow bounces back with “Something to Tide You Over” as funnymen Ted Danson and Leslie Nielsen are cast against type as two men at odds with each other. Harry (Danson) has been sleeping with Richard’s (Nielsen) wife Becky (Gaylen Ross). Richard confronts Harry and takes him out to his privately owned beach and proceeds to bury him up to his head, waiting for the tide to come in, much like he did to his wife. It’s a pretty unorthodox kind of revenge as is the plot twist where we see what happens to Harry and Becky after Richard leaves them to die.

Again, Romero comes up with some fantastic imagery, chief among them the shot of an irate Harry submerged in water, which evokes the watery demise of Shelley Winters’ character in The Night of the Hunter (1955). Once Richard returns home, Romero ratchets up the tension as we soon realize that Harry and Becky are back for some vengeance of their own. Savini’s makeup effects on the waterlogged couple are quite extraordinary and their distorted, watery voices are unsettling. It’s great to see Leslie Nielsen shed all of his comedic shtick to play a fairly sadistic son-of-a-bitch and he seems to relish the change of pace. Few remember that he started off his career playing dramatic roles because he’s so closely identified to his iconic character in the Naked Gun movies.

For me, the best story in Creepshow is “The Crate,” which focuses on Henry Northup (Hal Holbrook), a reserved college professor, and his friend and colleague Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver). Henry is married to Wilma “Billie” Northup (Adrienne Barbeau), a boozy, overbearing shrew of a wife, who shows up to a faculty party drunk and belligerent. Dexter is called away when a janitor (Don Keefer) shows him a crate from an Arctic expedition dating back to 1834. It was stored away under a staircase in the bowels of a building.

Naturally, Dexter and the janitor decide to open the crate and they unleash a ferocious creature that kills the hapless custodian in gruesome fashion (although, restrained for Savini). Pretty soon, Henry and Billie run afoul of the nasty beast as Savini gets a chance to flex his impressive makeup muscles. I can still recall seeing pictures of the crate monster in Fangoria around the time Creepshow came out and being scared by it. At a young, impressionable age, it took me awhile to see the film all the way through, but at least I read the comic book adaptation.

What really sells the horror in this segment is the absolutely sweaty, wild-eyed terrified reactions of Dexter to the two deaths he witnesses. Fritz Weaver does a great job as Dexter, never amping up his character’s anxiety too much and knowing just when to reel things in. Holbrook is also very good at showing Henry’s transformation from mild-mannered professor to calculating husband who plots the demise of his domineering wife. Adrienne Barbeau is a hoot as Henry’s obnoxious wife and looks like she’s having a blast bouncing off of Holbrook’s doormat of a husband. It’s a juicy role that lets the veteran actress vamp it up as only she can.

Finally, the story “They’re Creeping Up On You!” features E.G. Marshall as Upson Pratt (perfect name for his character), an anal-retentive neat freak businessman who lives in a sterile apartment. He’s obsessed with eradicating his place of bugs. It’s an amusing spin on the equally reclusive and germ-obsessed Howard Hughes fused with Ebenezer Scrooge. All Pratt cares about is money and clearing up his “bug problem,” but soon enough the omnipresent cockroaches have their day in a rather fitting finale to this film.

Marshall is excellent as the curmudgeonly germaphobe sealed up in how sterile fortress. He’s a prisoner of his own obsessions. This segment shows what a truly skilled actor can do when he has to carry a segment on his own, unlike King in his story. For anyone creeped out by bugs this segment is particularly disconcerting.

George Romero first met Stephen King when he was approached by Warner Bros. to direct an adaptation of Salem’s Lot, a novel about a small town in Maine that is terrorized by vampires. The two men met in Maine for several days and even though the project fell through, they kept in touch. King and Romero wanted to work together on an adaptation of the author’s epic novel The Stand, but realized that it would require major Hollywood studio funding to get made. In order to retain full artistic control, they decided to make another inexpensive film first that would make enough money to give Romero more clout with the studios.

In the summer of 1979, Romero and his business partner and producer Richard Rubinstein met with King in Maine to come up with ideas for an original film because it would be cheaper to make. One idea was a series of horror “blackouts,” short sketches leading to a major scare. Romero wanted to create five stories in five completely different styles: one in black and white, one in color, one in 3D, and so on. However, they decided that this approach was too experimental.

It was King that came up with the comic book idea and the “Creepshow” title. He wrote and completed the 142-page screenplay in October 1979. The first story, “Father’s Day,” was described as a “deliberate EC pastiche,” according to King. “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” was an adaptation of “Weeds,” a short story King published in the May 1976 issue of Cavalier. In fact, “Weeds” was originally written as the first chapter of a novel, but as the story started to spread beyond Verrill’s world, King could not find any more to say. For the film, he decided to change the tragic tone to a more comedic one.

“Something to Tide You Over” was inspired by King’s memories of being buried up to his neck in sand as a child and also from a film about Bluebeard the pirate being left to die below the high tide line. “The Crate” was adapted from a short story published in the July 1979 issue of Gallery magazine. The story was inspired by a real crate found under the stairs in the chemistry building at the University of Maine. What stuck in King’s mind was that the crate had been under the stairs for a hundred years and he imagined “something really sinister in there.” The creature in the crate was inspired by the Looney Tunes cartoon character, the Tasmanian Devil. For the last story, King originally had a mixture of spiders, cockroaches, beetles, and bugs that did not even exist. However, budgetary constraints forced him to use cockroaches exclusively.

Initially, King was not interested in a framing story to link the five stories because he felt that ones in past horror film anthologies were “silly and contrived.” Romero suggested a comic book as the framing device and King agreed. The Spectre, featured in the prologue and linking segments, was a reworking of the “Old Witch”, “The Cryptkeeper” and other narrators from the EC comic books. Romero used King’s first draft, making some changes with the author’s approval and input during principal photography, which often involved rewriting dialogue.

With King’s script, a rough budget and poster art created by EC comic book veteran artist Jack Kamen, the filmmakers shopped the project around Hollywood. Money wasn’t an issue with studio executives, but rather the content. They wanted creative input, which King and Romero balked at. So, they went back to United Film Distributing, a subsidiary of the United Artists Theater Circuit, who had backed Knightriders. They ended up financing Creepshow’s $8 million budget.

Pre-production began in early 1981 and Romero called on frequent collaborators, like makeup effects artist Tom Savini and cinematographer Michael Gornick. The production set up offices in Penn Hall Academy, an abandoned Pittsburgh grammar school, transforming their gymnasium into a soundstage. Principal photography began in late July 1981. In order to give each segment its own distinct look, King and Romero decided to employ the vibrant color scheme from the EC comic books through heightened, saturated lighting and utilizing stylized backgrounds. With the significant budget, Romero had the freedom to shoot on location as well as on a soundstage. Filming lasted 17 weeks, ending in late November.

Post-production was quite extensive with four different editors working on the five stories, a large amount of optical work, and composing the film’s score. Originally, Romero planned to use music from the Capitol Library (which he also used in Night of the Living Dead). He felt that the music would work well with the film, but assistant director John Harrison noticed the varying degrees of quality in material from the various decades and ended up creating much of the music in the film on a synthesizer. Rick Catizone created the animated sequences that acted as segues between segments in the style of Kamen’s comic book pages drawn for the film.

Creepshow debuted at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival and was a rousing success with a distribution deal made with Warner Bros. – the first time a studio would distribute a Romero film. The film received mixed reviews from mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “What they’ve done here is to recapture not only the look and the storylines of old horror comics, but also the peculiar feeling of poetic justice that permeated their pages.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “The best things about Creepshow are its carefully simulated comic-book tackiness and the gusto with which some good actors assume silly positions. Horror film purists may object to the levity even though failed, as a lot of it is.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “What one confronts in Creepshow is five consistently stale, derivative horror vignettes of various lengths and defects.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Creepshow is a faux naïf horror film: too arch to be truly scary, too elemental to succeed as satire.” Finally, in his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “The Romero-King collaboration has softened both the horror and the cynicism, but not by enough to betray the sources – Creepshow is almost as funny and as horrible as the filmmakers would clearly love it to be.”

If Romero was criticized for his rather non-descript directorial style prior to Creepshow, with this film the director showed that he could turn on the style with the best of them, cutting loose and having fun with the material. He pays homage to the classic EC comic books from the ‘50s by presenting a series of short stories populated by reprehensible protagonists that get their well-deserved retribution through supernatural means. Most horror anthologies are notoriously uneven in terms of quality and Creepshow is no different. Fortunately, there’s only one segment that isn’t very good and that was down to casting, while the rest of them are populated with familiar faces that seem to be having fun inhabiting their colorful characters, which translates into fun for the audience watching them.

Creepshow helped kick off a new wave of horror anthology films that included the likes of Nightmares (1983), Cat’s Eye (1985), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), and, more recently, Trick ‘r Treat (2007), which, with its mix of horror and comedy and use of garish, vibrant lighting, seems particularly indebted to Creepshow. While it certainly doesn’t contain the scathing social commentary of other Romero films, it is a fun, entertaining romp – a cleansing of the cinematic palette if you will, before he moved on to tackle the third installment of his Dead trilogy with Day of the Dead (1985).

SOURCES

Gagne, Paul R. “Creepshow: Masters of the Macabre.” Cinefantastique. September-October 1982.

Further reading: Check out Sean Gill's excellent take on Creepshow over at his blog.

Power

The rise of media consultants in the 1970s and 1980s changed the way political campaigns were run and how politicians were sold to the public. Make no mistake; this is an expensive practice with costs to run a successful campaign increasing every year. It is the job of the media consultant to create the most attractive image of their client to present to potential voters while creating a negative image of their opponent. This is nothing new, but back in 1986 when Sidney Lumet directed Power from a screenplay by David Himmelstein, the notion of a media consultant wielding influence was a novel concept. So novel that the film received mixed reviews by critics and was virtually ignored by audiences (it failed to recoup its modest $16 million budget). With hindsight one can see that the film was ahead of its time with a slick, charismatic protagonist that anticipated real-life counterparts like James Carville. Power asks some fascinating questions about the nature of power and influence and its effects. It also remains one of Lumet’s sorely under-appreciated films.


The consultant’s job is to create a positive image of the client and this is evident in the film’s opening scene where a South American political leader is making a speech to hundreds of people in a crowded town square. A bomb goes off and the man springs into action, rushing to the aid of a woman injured in the blast. He cradles her head in his arms, making him look like an instant hero until we see a camera crew documenting the entire event. Successful media consultant Pete St. John (Richard Gere) coaches the leader once he hustles him into a waiting van, telling him to wear his now bloody shirt for the rest of the campaign. Pete proceeds to tell the man what to say, how to act, and so on. We’re left wondering if the whole thing was staged or did he brilliantly capitalize on the moment?

Pete arrives back at his offices in the United States and they are a sleek, sterile chrome and metal affair with artificial lighting everywhere. He’s briefed on his upcoming meetings by Sydney Betterman (Kate Capshaw), his assistant and lover. We see Pete at work, juggling several clients at once. In New Mexico, he tries to coax a good performance out of a man by the name of Wallace Furman (Fritz Weaver) who’s running for governor. The clearly nervous man comes across as weak and hesitant on camera and so Pete gives him a brutally honest pep talk, laying it all out: “No offense but right now you look too soft to change a tire much less a state.” He tells Furman, “You’ve got align the perception with the reality.” Pete then proceeds to tell the man to go on a diet, start working out, change how he dresses, and get a tan.

This shocks the wealthy businessman who complains that Pete seems to be running his entire life, to which the consultant replies, “That means framing the overall strategy as well as deciding all the specifics.” And this includes the look of the campaign, what the bumper stickers will be, creating advertisements for print, radio and television, and analyzing polling numbers. Furman weakly counters that he wants to address some of his long-term plans, which Pete interrupts and tells him, “They’re not important. My job is to get you in. Once you’re there you do whatever your conscience tells you.” Richard Gere delivers this last line with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as this scene tells us everything we need to know about his character. Pete exudes the charisma and confidence of a man at the top of his profession and Gere nails it with a polished delivery that is one part used car salesman and one part gregarious con man.

Meanwhile, an unidentified Middle Eastern businessman is impressed with Pete’s work with the South American politician and how it undid a lot of work that his boss spent significant money on. He asks Arnold Billing (Denzel Washington), a rival public relations expert, to hire Pete for a job. He wants him to manage the campaign of a rich but little-known Ohio businessman Jerome Cade (J.T. Walsh) so that he’ll win a Senate seat. However, it is a spot that has been vacated by Pete’s friend Sam Hastings (E.G. Marshall) due to an unidentified illness so there is a possible conflict on interest. However, we’re never sure why Pete is so close to Hastings and why his decision to drop out affects him so much. Was he Pete’s mentor? Are they related? Pete seems to respect Hastings integrity but this seems rather odd for a man who is loyal only to money. We learn that Hastings may not be ill at all so why is he dropping out all of the sudden? It seems like Billing might have had something to do with it. He’s a young, up and comer who clearly has set his sights on taking down Pete.

And why not? Pete is one of those guys that travels in his own private jet. He wears expensive suits, has sex with his attractive assistant and has a roster of only the wealthiest clients. He’s arrogant and confident but Hastings is his lone weak spot, which Billing seeks to exploit. Pete also crosses paths with his boozy ex-mentor Wilfred Buckley (Gene Hackman) who has a memorable scene embarrassing himself with a drunken tirade on an airport runway. Yet he still shows glimmers of brilliance in a nice scene where he tells a grassroots underdog candidate (Matt Salinger) what he needs to do to make a difference.

J.T. Walsh is at his reptilian best as an ambitious wannabe politician with money to burn and ruthless ambition to spare. He seems like an ideal client for Pete – he’s filthy rich – however something doesn’t feel right. Billing works for him but in some kind of vague capacity. Cade appears to be simpatico with Hastings’ policies except for one: his pet project, which was solar energy. Is that the real reason the senator suddenly vacated his seat? When Pete attempts to dig deeper into Cade’s past, Billing comes after him, setting up an intriguing game of cat and mouse. Denzel Washington is impressive in an early role as an icy, amoral media consultant. With limited screen-time, he creates an imposing figure because Billing is such an enigma with a secret agenda. In some scenes, Washington sports a dead-eye look that is quite unnerving and in others he is all smiles but it isn’t meant to be reassuring, just creepy.

Power is a little long and a subplot involving Pete’s ex-wife (Julie Christie) feels like unnecessary padding and could have easily been removed. The film also skirts the edges of cutesy idealism, especially when a character at the film’s climax delivers an inspirational speech a la Network (1976), but fortunately Lumet pulls back to show that the political landscape hasn’t changed all that much.

In the 1980s, Gere was an A-list sex symbol thanks to An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) but he parlayed that clout to tackle a diverse roster of roles in films like American Gigolo (1980), Breathless (1983) and, of course, Power, which may be the best of the bunch. He plays a slick media spin-doctor that begins to grow a conscience and how one ruthless competitor starts to chip away at his confidence. Gere is able to get under Pete’s skin, past the surface details to reveal someone that questions what he’s doing. Over the course of the film Pete finds that he no longer delights in crushing his opponents. If anything, he experiences a crisis in confidence and Gere is quite excellent at conveying this dilemma. The actor is also good at turning his trademark boyish charm on and off while conveying just what a master manipulator Pete is. Yet, it is his relationship with Hastings that humanizes the character. Interestingly, Gere was not Lumet’s first choice to play Pete St. John. In fact, he had been unimpressed with the actor’s performances at the time. However, the two men met and talked over two days. Lumet said, “He was so intelligent, with such a strong sense of self, and he showed such a real desire to act again—to get back to real acting.”

They say knowledge is power and that is certainly true when it comes politics. Insider knowledge and the ability to get it and then use it is everything. That is what makes Pete so successful. However, when someone else can get it faster and use it just as ruthlessly then this creates a conflict. Power takes a fascinating look at media manipulation, like how a goofed take for a political ad can be tweaked in editing to actually make the subject look good. It’s all about perception and in that sense it is a lot like filmmaking. The film is more than just being about politics. Lumet also gradually incorporates elements of a thriller as Pete’s dealings with Billing and Cade begin to affect his personal and professional life.

Power originated from newspaper reporter David Himmelstein. He had previously worked as a speechwriter for former Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. He got the idea while attending Harvard as a Neiman Fellow. During election night in 1982, he saw a continuous loop of T.V. spots from candidates across the United States that a fellow student had assembled. Himmelstein found it fascinating because it made him realize that “the candidates were all basically interchangeable.” Furthermore, he realized that “the guys who had put together the spots were at least as significant, if not more significant, in the process.”

As early as 1984, Himmelstein began dabbling in screenwriting and when one of his scripts won a prize, he was noticed by Hollywood. His second script, entitled Power, was picked by Lumet as his next directing project but only after it underwent five rewrites. The veteran filmmaker was drawn to the project because he saw it as a commentary on “the mechanization of our lives, the loss of contact,” and how it was about our “terminally compromised political process.” He felt that “a candidate doesn’t talk to us anymore. They talk to us through someone else. These people are not corrupt. It’s much more frightening than that because we are not talking about evil people, we are talking about a system that is slowly evolving.”

Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out four and wrote, “But the movie itself seems to sense that it's going nowhere. The climax is a pointless, frustrating montage of images. It's a good montage, but it belongs somewhere in the middle of the movie; it states the problem, but not the solution or even the lack of a solution.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, Power is a well-meaning, witless, insufferably smug movie that – if it does anything at all, and I'm not sure it does – anesthetizes legitimate outrage at some of the things going on in our society.” The Toronto Star’s Ron Base wrote, “When everyone is in place, and such matters as conflict and plot begin to emerge, the movie groans into the sort of tiresome, preachy dialectic that Lumet is always being accused of making. This time his accusers are right.” In his review for the Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote, “What's genuinely odd about Power is how stale it gets whenever it tries to get at an emotion – everything human is alien to it. The movie only works when it's immersed in the very world it professes to despise.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson criticized Himmelstein’s script: “In writing his didactic melodrama of manipulation and image-making on a global scale, Himmelstein apparently felt his news—that today's political candidates are created not only equal but interchangeable—could stand on its own, without the need to beguile us with characterization or suspense.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott criticized the casting of Richard Gere: “Casting Gere as a callow but clever media consultant was a stroke of inspiration, but when Gere is required to find integrity and sincerity, the performance falls apart – integrity and sincerity from Richard Gere are like sweetness and light from Joan Collins.” The rare positive notice came from the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, who gave it three out of four stars, and wrote, “Holding everything together is that the film accurately fixes on our collective guilt about the superficial basis upon which most of us vote. There’s also Richard Gere’s taut portrayal of Pete St. John, a slick imagemaker who shapes his clients into just so much silly political putty … Gere is at his best in this sort of oily role.”

Looked at now, Power was incredibly prescient. At the time, the public knew little about political and media consultants but thanks to the highly acclaimed documentary The War Room (1993) and popular satirical comedy Wag the Dog (1997), people have a better idea of what these people do. In fact, the two successful media consultants that helped get Bill Clinton elected as president, as documented in The War Room, went on to become media darlings in their own right, appearing in T.V. and films. This kind of consultation has become a staple of political campaigning and is big business. With the right kind of spin and a media savvy candidate, the sky’s the limit. Lumet’s film shows the darker side, like how campaigning is all about image and very little about substance. Elections have been reduced to popularity contests. Complicated issues have been reduced to simplistic soundbites. In Power, politics are a dirty business (with an emphasis on business) and it shows in captivating detail just how dirty by taking us behind the scenes to show us the inner workings and the image creators. Lumet’s film is ripe for re-discovering as much of what it examines has not dated at all, making it more relevant than ever before.

SOURCES

Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision. University Press of Kentucky. 2001.

Frederick, Arthur. “From Reporter to Screenwriting Success.” United Press International. January 24, 1986.

Friendly, David T. “Selling Power: Trying to Come Closer.” Los Angeles Times. January 26, 1986.

DVD of the Week: 12 Angry Men: Criterion Collection

Adapted from the 1954 teleplay of the same name, 12 Angry Men (1957) marked the auspicious feature film debut of director Sidney Lumet who had cut his teeth on live television in New York City. He brought a gritty, edgy realism to this film, an approach that flew in the face of traditional, more polished Hollywood cinema. With the exception of Henry Fonda, Lumet eschewed movie star casting in favor of actors with a background in New York stage and T.V. work, like E.G. Marshall, Lee J. Cobb, and Jack Warden. The film’s legacy has endured and been felt for decades and without it there would be shows like Law & Order or John Grisham novels. While 12 Angry Men was well-received by critics at the time, it certainly didn’t set the box office on fire but over the years its reputation has grown and is now regarded as a classic.


Lumet begins the film with a solemn opening shot of the impressive pillars of the hall of justice in New York City. In a court room, a Puerto Rican teenager has been charged with murdering his father. If the 12-man jury can find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, then he could be given the death penalty as is the case with first-degree murder. And so, the rest of the film plays out in a small room on “the hottest day of the year,” with no air-conditioning as these men must decide the fate of another.

Before they get started, the men engage in idle chit-chat – getting to know you stuff as their various personalities begin to emerge. During a preliminary vote, everyone says the kid is guilty except for one man (Henry Fonda) who doesn’t want to condemn him to death until they talk about it. As he points out, suppose they’re wrong. Each man says why they think the teenager is guilty and some range from flimsy (“I just think he’s guilty.”) to logical (E.G. Marshall) to opinionated (Lee J. Cobb) but no one can convince the dissenting juror who makes some pretty good points. The juror isn’t saying that the boy is guilty, just that he’s not sure that he did it. The longer they stay sequestered in that hot room, the more tempers flare up as their prejudices come to bear and the dissenting juror begins to garner support with his rational dissection of the evidence and the testimony from the case.

As the film progresses, this impressive cast of actors really impress as they bounce off each other in the small room, from the quiet, reserved juror played by Jack Klugman to the bluster of the juror played by Lee J. Cobb to the unwavering decency of the juror played by Henry Fonda. Lumet is able to keep our interest in the story that unfolds by maintaining the focus on his brilliant cast. He doesn’t try to get fancy with the camerawork or manipulate us with music. He lets the actors do their thing with the first-rate screenplay by Reginald Rose that results in a film that epitomizes the phrase, “hard-hitting drama.” 12 Angry Men is a powerful statement about the American judicial system – one that hasn’t changed much since this film was made except maybe it’s gotten worse – and how personal views and prejudices can influence a jury.

Special Features:

The first disc starts off with “The Television Version” that was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and which first aired on September 1954 for the series Westinghouse Presents Studio One. It obviously doesn’t feature the star-studded cast of the film but is a pretty solid adaptation in its own right. Ron Simon, curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York City, introduces it and puts the program into context, talks about the director, cast and so on. He points out that it was experiment to see if theater could work on T.V.

“12 Angry Men: From TV to The Big Screen” features film scholar Vance Kepley talking about how it went from a teleplay to film. Rather fittingly, he briefly gives the origins of 12 Angry Men and its numerous adaptations over the years. He talks about the challenges of working in live T.V.

Also included is a trailer.

The second disc includes “Lumet on Lumet,” a collection of archival interviews with the director who talks about his long career. He talks about getting into show business as a kid. He also discusses his work ethic and how he applied it to his films. Lumet also shares some of his interesting life experiences.

“Reflections on Sidney” features friend and collaborator Walter Bernstein sharing some of his observations of Lumet, like how he enjoyed working with actors. Bernstein also talks about how they became friends and tells some good stories.

Ron Simon returns to talk about the importance of writer Reginald Rose who wrote 12 Angry Men. He points that among the great early T.V. writers Rose is the least known and explains the reasons why.

Also included is Tragedy in a Temporary Town, a teleplay written by Rose and directed by Lumet. It aired in 1956 and features a few of the actors who would go on to appear in the film version of 12 Angry Men.

Finally, cinematographer John Bailey talks about fellow cinematographer Boris Kaufman’s visual style and work with Lumet. He gives a brief biographical sketch of the man. Bailey talks about Kaufman’s early, groundbreaking work with French filmmaker Jean Vigo. He also examines Kaufman’s work on 12 Angry Men.