Re the ethnicity of the confused, I would speculate he was Italian.
One thing I think is odd now that I think about it, why did they make a big deal about whether “I’m going to kill you” is sincere or not? There’s no situation in which it matters. What, he yelled out “I’m going to kill you” and then a second later in the same room someone else stabbed the victim?
Here is my theory. (I’m new here, so I don’t know did anybody already wrote something similar). Boy purchusaed the knife and put it in his pocket. After fight with his father he we to see the movie. He dropped the knife somewhere near the house. He went to see a movie to cool off. Doors were left open. It was pretty unsafe neighbourhood. While boy was watching a movie, Burglar decides to rob his house. Coincidentally, he was the same race and about the same height and build like a Kid. (There were lots of people that race living there and Kid was pretty average height and build. Also, he was talking with some friends. Maybe he mentioned that house is empty and one of them decided to take advantage of it.) On a way toward the house he saw a knife and picked it up in case somebody interrupts him, or he simply wanted to have it because it looked nice. He tried to rob the place, but kid’s father confronted him. They fought. Burglar stabbed him, wiped knife clean of fingerprints and fleed without taking anything, realizing what he done, deciding not to stay there any longer. I think that woman saw murder, but she wasn’t wearing eyeglasses and she saw killer unclearly. She witnessed an argument few hours before and it was still fresh in her mind, and then she witnessed another traumatic event-murder. And killer was the same race and similar height and build like the Kid. Maybe her mind accidently convinced her that she saw Kid stabbing father? There is logical explanation why boy didn’t remember anything about the movie: he probably wasn’t paying full attention because he was still upset after the argument, maybe he choose a movie randomly, planning to watch it to cool off, and on top of all he found his father dead when he arrives home (if we believe his story, one of police officers also assaulted him).
I am willing to believe theory about old man’s testimony presented in a movie.
He was obviously killed by…wait for it…
ZOMBIES!!
Mislav, thanks for the reply and welcome to the board. For future reference the date the post was made is timestamped in the upper left corner. The last time anyone responded to that thread was almost a decade ago and several of those posters aren’t even active here anymore.
Just clicking on a forum now or hitting New Posts in the bar near the top will give you all the recent threads that are still under discussion.
Yesh, I know it’s a zombie, but …
Has anybody seen a fairly recent Russian version of the film? I only saw it once, and it struck me as pretty bizarre. Like, the jurrors all used their racial, ethnic and religious prejudices for good rather than evil. “C’mon, would a Jew really do such a thing?”, and like that. They found the guy not guilty, but for the oddest of reasons.
I’d like to see it again, if only to see if it is as strange as I remember it to bee.
(I know this is a zombie.)
If I recall correctly, it was also a hot day, and the deliberation room was not air conditioned.
So what if it’s a zombie? This has always been one of my favorite films. In BOTH the versions I’ve seen, the 1957 and the 1997 version.
The 1997 adaptation had some awesome new angles. The script was slightly revised in some areas (the playscript that is currently in print reflects some of the new additions). One of the more interesting additions to this is a short scene where one of the jurors asks #5, “If the kid didn’t do it, then who did?” Juror 5 answers that this man was known to have been a violent man who was known for starting fights and gambling and may well have had a lot of enemies in the neighborhood. That’s my theory, which is somewhat close to Mislav’s–that maybe one of the guy’s enemies stabbed him with the son’s own knife knowing that s/he had a perfect fall guy for the crime.
There are also a few other interesting additions in the 1997 Showtime version, which has a cast every bit as top-notch as the original (Jack Lemmon in the Fonda role and George C. Scott in the Cobb role, for example). At the very beginning, over a black screen, we hear the rumble of an el train, growing louder and louder, until, at its loudest point, we hear a voice yelling, “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!” And the thing is, we CAN’T tell whether it’s a young man’s voice, a high-pitched older man’s voice, or maybe even a woman’s…we can barely even make out the words.
There are also some interesting casting choices. In the original, the boy’s ethnicity was never revealed–it’s just hinted that he’s some kind of minority during the one juror’s rant about “those people”. We see a dark-haired, slightly dark-skinned boy, but he could be Hispanic, Italian, Greek–anything. In the 1997 version, the kid is clearly Hispanic and the bigoted juror calls him a “spic”.
The jurors’ racial makeup is also more mixed, although it’s still all-male. The Klugman and Fiedler roles are played by African-Americans…when explaining about his slum background, the one juror tells them he nurses that “trash” in Harlem hospital six nights a week. But the most interesting wrinkle is that the bigoted juror is himself an African-American (Mykelti Williamson). He’s a black supremacist who left the Black Panthers because they weren’t radical enough for him (no, I’m not kidding). He tries to get the other African-American jurors on his side during his rant (“This kid here…we got him! We gotta stamp their kind out before they breed us out!”) but they’re having none of it.
I also love the extra lines they add to the last juror’s rant at the end… “He said, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ I don’t care what kind of a man was, that was his own father! …Why am I the only one who sees it?..I can feel the knife going in…”
So I’d recommend this one just as much.
Oh, and as for the business of the kid not remembering the movies he saw? I agree with the posters upthread…he probably wasn’t even going to the movies for the sake of watching them, but for the sake of being anywhere else but home. It’s likely he never even registered what was onscreen–probably spent the whole picture counting the days until he turned eighteen and could leave, and wondering what his options were once he did. Then to come home and find his father murdered and himself (obviously) a suspect…well, you can imagine that his mind would go a bit blank.
I wasn’t bothered by it a bit. I believe that the jury room is sacrosanct. Once the jury gets in there, they get to make their own rules and decide for themselves what is the “right” way to come to a verdict. If one of the other jurors had had a problem with what Fonda did, and that juror requested a mistrial, then fine. But if the other eleven jurors were ok with it, then I don’t give a rat’s ass whether it was or was not technically misconduct. Besides, it made for good drama; it is a movie, after all.
As for the actual OP, personally I kind of think the kid was not guilty, but I also agree with other posters that his actual guilt or innocence wasn’t the point of the story. I mean, it’s kind of like asking whether Godot had a beard.
Did he? I can wait for your answer.
Very well said. Great theory.
The kid was guilty yes. Im as certain about that as pretty much anything else. If he shouldve been let go, certainly it was also right to let OJ Simpson go, for instance.
The evidence that condemns him is te knife. He loses the knife through a hole in his pocket within hours that his father is killed by the exact same knife? Thats so unlikely that its practically impossible. The chance that the murderer uses the same knife (assuming he wasnt being framed) must already be 10,000 to 1. And the chance that he loses the knife within just those hours another say 10.000 to one. That gives us a combined likelihood of 100,000,000 to 1. And on top of that there is all the other evidence, which, while possibly uncertain, is corraborating. And if you cannot condemn a man who has the odds of being guilty in excess of 99,99% then you can never condemn anyone.
Sorry for spelling, I wrote the post on my ipad.
Maybe he lost the knife near or in the home and killer found it and used it?
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie and could use a reminder, was it determined by the prosecution that the murder weapon actually was the kid’s knife, or just the same model? I thought the whole point of the dissenting juror going out and getting a knife was to demonstrate that although it was the same model as the kid’s lost knife, it wasn’t necessarily his knife. Unless the murder weapon had some distinguishing characteristic identifying it as the kid’s knife, I wouldn’t accept the prosecution’s claim that it was the kid’s knife.
Unless I’m forgetting a crucial detail, there seems to be a very plausible alternate theory of the crime. The defendant and his dad have a fight, he storms out to go to the movies. While he’s away, another kid with a similar appearance (which sounds like it would be not at all implausible given the demographics of the neighborhood) attempts to burglarize the place. Things go bad, and in panic he kills the father using his own knife which pretty much all the tough kids in the neighborhood carry. The defendant comes home to the scene. I don’t recall any evidence that contradicts that possibility.
The kid not being able to recall the movie is far too vague for me to grant that as evidence for the prosecution. Did they mean that when the police initially questioned him he flubbed the name of the movie, or that after things had calmed down a bit and during the more extensive questioning he was unable to recall any details of the movie at all? Without a clearer account of how the defendant responded, I’m inclined to view it as closer to the former than the latter, and I forget things like that all the time.
More likely than not the kid did it. A crime of passion in a violent family fits the facts pretty well, even with some minor discrepancies. But there is certainly reasonable doubt, and the prosecution thoroughly failed in their job to address why no other theory of the crime is reasonable.
IIRC, there was no proof whatsoever that it was “the exact same knife.” It was the same model of knife – it looked identical, but wasn’t necessarily the same one.
I saw it this summer. It’s right after that he can’t remember. I think a few days (weeks?) later, he remembers all the movies/stars.
Yes it wasn’t necessarily the same one, but it looked identical. And that’s what I think is extremely unlikely. They even said it was an unusual knife (although that may be in doubt.)
That’s a possibility, but also extremely unlikely. (Except as I said if they were trying to frame the kid, and that argument was never put forward.)
So some person is on the way to murder the father, and on that exact night the kid happens to have dropped a knife out of his pocket, and the murderer then picks that up not knowing that it incredibly happened to come from the son of the person he was planning to murder, and decides to use that as a murder weapon instead of whatever he originally intended.
That’s a fantastic hypothetical turn of events. And you have to take that together with all the other corroborating evidence. All the other accusing factors might individually be false (the lady might need glasses, the old man might not have seen or heard him, he might just have been confused at the time about the movie, etc). But for the kid to be innocent it requires not just that one of them are false, but that all of them are, in addition to that crazy knife hypothetical being the case. Together, the mathematical certainty of his guilt is about as high as you will ever get, in excess of 99.99%.
The major problem with this is again the probability. The risk of a burglary turning murder is pretty low. They said the knife was uncommon (although it was shown to be not difficult to find), so we can assume that at least not everyone carried it. And the kid had to drop the knife out of his pocket, which itself is unlikely, on the exact same night that all this other unlikely stuff happened. The unlikeliness of all this happening together is extremely high, and if it is deemed “reasonably likely”, then we have to contend with pretty much all murderers going free (eg more than 99.9%), including for instance OJ Simpson.
It absolutely was in doubt. One of the key scenes in the movie was when Henry Fonda produced an identical knife that he bought out on the street in order to demonstrate that the knife wasn’t as unusual as the prosecution claimed. Though I can’t recall if anything was said about how long he had to search for it or in how many places.