12 angry men 1957 - The finest courtroom drama

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IMDB rating: 8,9

Director: Sidney Lumet
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec, Robert Webber

"Twelve Angry Men is a tightly wound top of a movie. Each scene ratchets up the tension another notch as Henry Fonda's character tries desperately to open the minds of his fellow jurors. The setting - a claustrophobic jury room in the dog days of summer - superbly augments the suspense. Operating within the constraints of a small budget, first-time director Sidney Lumet tightens the noose by accentuating the throbbing pulse of the ceiling fan and slowly narrowing his shots on his characters as the film approaches its climax. Based on Reginald Rose's well-known play, which had been adapted to the television screen three years earlier, Twelve Angry Men boasts a series of excellent performances by young actors who would soon become household names, including Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam. However, it is the film's established stars - Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall and most importantly Fonda - who play the leads, delivering the goods like seasoned pros. The film has instructional value as a study of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the jury system, but its real value is how it allows each member of the cultural mosaic of a jury to develop into distinct, damaged, and interesting characters. In a well-crafted metaphor for the broader outline of society, the jury members must confront their prejudices in order to see that justice prevails.
A pet project of Henry Fonda's, Twelve Angry Men was his only foray into film production; the actor's partner in this venture was Reginald Rose. A flop when it first came out (surprisingly, since it cost almost nothing to make), Twelve Angry Men holds up beautifully when seen today.
Nominated for three Oscars, Twelve Angry Men ran into the juggernaut of Bridge on the River Kwai and came up empty handed.
It was remade for television in 1997 by director William Friedkin with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott." - www.allmovie.com

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The Ox-Bow incident 1943 - A brilliantry structured classic western-noir about vigilante justice

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: William A. Wellman
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Anthony Quinn, William Eythe, Harry Morgan, Jane Darwell, Matt Briggs, Harry Davenport, Frank Conroy

"This now-classic indictment of mob rule was a pet project of both star Henry Fonda and director William Wellman, both of whom agreed to work on lesser 20th Century-Fox projects in exchange for this film.
The Ox-Bow Incident was an anomaly at the time it was released. Produced in the middle of World War II, when Hollywood was concentrating on movies that either boosted morale or entertained, it did neither: it was a major studio release, with a hot young star (Henry Fonda) in the lead, about an unjustified lynching in the 1870s West. Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel had been kicking around for years, but Hollywood had never had much luck making movies about mob violence and vigilante justice (Fritz Lang's Fury had been a box-office disaster for MGM before the war, despite the presence of Spencer Tracy), and no one was anxious to film it. Twentieth Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck agreed to do the movie only because Fonda and Wellman agreed to do other films for the studio, and the result was a movie that was singularly unpopular during its initial release but which has aged magnificently. It was a labor of love by all concerned, a chilling indictment of American justice and America's past in which there are no heroes, just participants who are less guilty than others. Once the war was over, and the movie made it to television, it began to find an audience; the belated response from critics and viewers, as well his pride in having made it, inspired Fonda's similar effort 14 years later to make 12 Angry Men, a movie built on a similar theme. Ironically, 12 Angry Men also took decades to find its audience and begin recording a profit. For all its lack of recognition at the time, The Ox-Bow Incident has become, along with Otto Preminger's Laura, perhaps the most distinctive and well-remembered film issued by Fox during the first half of the 1940s." - www.allmovie.com

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