Just watched (most of) “12 Angry Men” for the first time.
And I formed the opinion as I watched it, that although they are explicitly arguing about an Italian kid, they are implicitly arguing about the fate of a black kid.
It’s “those people”, and “do I smell too?” and a knife crime. Those could refer to Italian slums, but the movie is set in 1957, not 1907.
Is that just me, and the way the movie has aged? Or do you think that in 1957, in a movie about prejudice, people were seeing a subtext?
And yes, it’s a group of white men. My recent jury experience was around 50/50 gender split, and aged 18-70, and that group of 12 angry men definitely looked weird.
Black civil rights were a pop culture third rail in the 1950s and ad sponsored TV was the medium that made the biggest effort to steer clear of it. There was no organized effort to defend bigotry against Italians (or Puerto Ricans), but you risked offending whole states and their elected officials by calling out bigotry against blacks. If it had been written for theater release, they may have risked it (and not opened in many markets in the South), but a network teleplay had to appeal to viewers all over the country.
viz: West Side Story, stage play opened in 1957 (same year as above movie) one gang definitely Puerto Rican, the other gang not really ethnically identified IIRC, so I guess they were “white,” or anyway at least one generation local.
I never got the sense that the identity of the victim and accused were standing in for anything other than what they were. Lots of bigoted people would have referred to Puerto Ricans as “those people” and would have said that they smelled. Same thing that they might have said about Mexicans or (earlier perhaps) Italians.
As a matter of interest, the TV script was adapted from a 1954 teleplay for CBS Studio One by the same author. The stage play was premiered in London in 1964, written after the movie. My high school did a co-ed version called 12 Angry Jurors in 1967.
You kind of have to look at the rants of Juror #10 and the prevailing stereotypes to decide if the defendant was intended to be a different minority. He calls “them” all violent liars who don’t value human life like “regular” Americans. That actually sounds like the stereotypical Italian/mafioso than a Puerto Rican of Black stereotype.
Doesn’t one of the jurors say that he sympathizes with the defendant, because he (the juror) comes from a similar background? IIRC, he was the second one to come around.
For fans of the movie, one of the most amazing and gut bustingly hilarious parody sketches I’ve ever seen was done by Amy Schumer, in her show episode “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer”. She somehow got about a half dozen a-list and b-list stars to participate, including Jeff Goldblum and Paul Giamatti. I can’t recommend it enough.
Googling, I found the play script, based on the television script, and the only on-stage characters are the jurors and the guard (briefly). (The judge and clerk are off-stage voices.) The defendant doesn’t even appear, so you’re free to apply whatever prejudice you have.
Their (Puerto Rico) food did smell- delicious IMHO- but to middle aged 1950’s white dudes who thought “spicy” was black pepper, it did smell odd, and thus so did their neighborhoods. Even today, some New Yorkers claim they can tell many neighborhoods simply by the smell.
