Yes. I’m mildly embarrassed that I didn’t pick up that “Porto Rican” was as likely as
“black”, but I think that the dialog was intentionally open-ended / generic about prejudice target (at least, that’s my excuse).
I missed the opening court scene the first time around. The jury was dancing around the subject of who “they” were, and I just filled it in. In my life, ‘black’ people and ‘wogs’ have been more the subject of prejudice than ‘spics’, so that’s what I jumped to.
Right. They all suddenly find a reason to look out the window, turning their backs on him.
It’s been a while since I last watched it, but what I remember is that after Juror 10 (the bigot) went on one of his rants, Juror 5 said he’d lived in a slum all his life, that he had played in yards that were filled with garbage, and finished with “maybe you can smell it on me.” I think that was the only reference to smell.
Fair enough. I think I missed the opening first time I saw it as well. Kid looked so innocent.
Which was weird, since even No. 3 turned his back. Not a totally unified front. Great staging and choreography in that Moviefilm.
Yes. And from that point on, Juror 10 didn’t utter another word. When he cast his “not guilty” vote, he did it by shaking his head.
That was awesome - thanks. The reference to characters in The Facts of Life was hilarious.
The comment about how Jo would break that guy in half was my favorite.
Anecdotally, my husband’s grandparents experienced anti-Italian racism as late at the 1970s. So it’s plausible to me they were really talking about Italians. But they were also, probably, really talking about racism in general.
I loved that movie. I don’t know if my takeaway was supposed to be the takeaway, because I came away with an impression of how terrifyingly arbitrary our justice system can be. I had no sense of whether the guy was truly innocent because you have to go based on the impressions of suggestive, fallible jurors. Truly harrowing.
Didn’t it even end with someone asking the hero who he thought actually did it, and he said probably the defendant?
A third-generation Italian-American friend in the early 1980s got a bit of that from the parents of a super-WASPy girlfriend. Sort of gender-swapped Love Story, so to speak. Although by that time (and this includes the time of the 1970 Love Story itself), it was hard to disentangle “pure” ethnicity-based racism from anti-Catholicism and class prejudice.
In their case, they were extremely successful in business and it was often assumed they were earning it dishonestly. Which really hurt his grandfather.
No, the very end has Juror 3 admit that his strained relationship with his son was the reason why he was strongly voting guilty, and the revelation causes him to change his vote. And Jurors 8 and 9 exchange names before leaving.
But, I think that a lot of people analyzing the film came away with the impression that the defendant may have been guilty, despite everything discussed in the film to change people’s votes, and maybe that’s what you were remembering.
Yeah, I wish they had left off at the end when Henry Fonda walks out of the jury room and we see the detritus of what everyone left on the table. That last little vignette just takes me completely out of the picture.
Who killed O J Simpsons wife? She’s a women, she’s dead, without seeing any evidence, I would think probably her husband did it..
Same here. Lacking any valid evidence, I think it was probably a family member.
That’s statistics, not proof.
I recently saw Our Man Flint, and In Like Flint; those probably didn’t showcase his range.
Well, he got to do Angry Bluster, and a paycheck.
Detritus including the second knife. Probably not the smoothest move to leave behind evidence of juror misconduct, but, hey, it was the 1950s, simpler times and all.
I wondered if jury directions had changed since the 1920’s (Assuming, as per usual, that anything represented in 1955 had to be already long out of date)
I’ve never read an example of Jury Directions at all. I know that it was an iconic moment in English law when they found that paying off the jury to achieve a result was improper.
It’s a fantastic film, but it does leave you wondering, did the kid even have a defence attorney?!