Why Jury Duty is Always Disappointing

12 Angry Men (1957)
Directed by Sidney Lumet, Written by Reginald Rose

If you care about trial by jury then 12 Angry Men is your film. This is the film that ruined jury duty for everybody in America, not because it suddenly turned all jurors into serious deliberative bodies that thought through cases and tried to work out their individual biases, but because it made most of us expect something better than the panel of bozos that actually show up first thing in the morning at the courthouse.
I’ll say this up front: If I showed up for jury duty early one morning and my peers looked like the jury in this film, I might consider it worth my time to go on with the process without wanting to kill myself.
Instead, even when we get jurors who try hard (probably because they, too, saw this movie at some point) they're just disappointing or incredibly dumb.
Granted, the jurors here are supposed to represent a representative slice of America in the '50s and most of them do start out as assholish as you would expect a representative jury in America to be, but even if it's just the expectation that there'll be some nice guy in a white suit who really thinks things over like Henry Fonda, then every real jury is disappointing after seeing this film.
But, the disappointment of reality is probably the best reason to see 12 Angry Men every so often, because its value as a lesson in civic virtue alone is worth your time. See, it's not that I see this film and think that there's ever been a jury that works like this, but rather I think that it's supposed to make us think harder about what we're doing when we serve on a jury. There's a presumption that we all want to be like the lazy and bigoted people on this jury who just want to call yea or nay and get on with their day and that presumption is spot on. And that's exactly why we need 12 Angry Men in the back of our minds to shame us into giving jury duty the respect it deserves with consideration and thoughtfulness. Democracy as a principle depends on this. Because we should all want to be like Henry Fonda's Juror #8, thinking about the evidence giving it our full attention and listening to others while formulating an opinion on the verdict. We all want Juror #8 to exist, because maybe one day we'll be in need of someone like that and a jury that consists entirely of bozos and dipsticks is a scary thought. 12 Angry Men is all about inspiring us to be Juror #8, or at least open to the possibility of listening to that person.
So, 12 Angry Men will forever ruin jury duty but that's exactly why everyone must see it. It's your duty as a citizen to watch this film and then be forever disappointed when jury duty is crappy.

The other reason to see this film is because it's well-written and chock full of great actors playing characters with names like Juror #4, Juror #6 and Juror #7. These actors are so good they don't even need character names, they just use numbers. #1 is Martin Balsam, who would go on to fall backwards down the staircase of the Bates home in Psycho. #2 is John Fiedler, the voice of Piglet. That's right, Piglet is one of the jurors. #3 is Lee J. Cobb, the original Willy Loman. #4 is E.G. Marshall. Do you think you can handle more? #5 is Jack Klugman. You think you can handle another star? #6 is Edward Binns. Don't know who Ed Binns was? Well, that's okay because #7 is Jack Warden. I don't think you can handle any more, but then wearing the #8 jersey is the aforementioned Henry [echo] Fon-da! [Echo.] But wait, you get four more jurors for the price of 8, including Ed Begley (Sr.) as Juror #10. And rounding out the crew is Joseph Sweeney the elderly Juror #9 and the respectable George Voskovec and Robert Webber. It's hard to think of a more all-star cast this side of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World or The Longest Day.

Sure, there are some dated aspects of the story and characters, but the charm of the film is that it doesn't need to be up to date to make its point. The thirst for justice is never dated. (And if you can say that last line without cracking up, then you, sir/madam are a model citizen.)