Summary
[Reginald Rose]'s story of a sequestered jury debating the fate of an accused man-moving one argument at a time from presumed guilt to presumed innocence-was and is a dynamite example of the gut-level power of socially conscious television melodrama. [Sidney Lumet]'s film has lost none of its power in the intervening years; if anything it's become even more emotionally spring-loaded as political and economic scandals have shaken the pillars of democracy.
It's also deeply, profoundly Russian, in the way that Tolstoy's War and Peace is unequivocably Russian. There's a weary, cynical grace to 11 of these 12, unnamed, initially bored, and impatient men that strikes me as being as Eastern European as it gets. These men have seen the Communists come and go and they're currently watching their relatively new democracy undergo what appears to be more or less the same death contortions. They're jaded, and they're debating the fate of a young man who is a member of a socially ostracized ethnic minority (Chechens), but one thing they're not is ineloquent.See the full content of this document
Extract
Russian Maladies
Russian Maladies
A courtroom remake as contemporary as the headlines.The film 12 is essentially a Russianized version of Sidney Lumet's masterful 1957 courtroom dr...See the full content of this document
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