Tools of Characterization
Characterization in 12 Angry Men
Thoughts and Opinions
In a room filled with twelve angry jurors, you're bound to get a clash of thoughts and opinions that tell you a lot about the characters you're dealing with. For starters, you've got someone like Juror #10 who says on several occasions that he doesn't like people of color and wants to convict the defendant simply because he's not white.
On the other hand, you've got a guy who's happy to send the kid to the electric chair or let him go depending on which verdict helps him (the juror) get to a baseball game in time. In contrast to these jerks, you have men like Juror #8, #9, and #11, all of whom believe in justice and the goodness of people. And by the time the movie is over, you're bound to know a lot about all these characters just based on the opinions they've expressed.
Props
We learn a lot about Juror #7 because of the baseball tickets in his box: these bad boys are the only things he cares about. He cares about these tickets so much that he's willing to send a kid to the electric chair just to get out of the courthouse and over to the ball field as soon as possible. In contract, Juror #8 cares about a knife he bought for six dollars because this knife totally undermines the argument that the murder weapon in the trial was completely unique.
One of the reasons the movie relies so much on props like these is that it was first written as a television play. Since it takes place almost entirely in one room, the writer (Reginald Rose) needed to experiment with different ways of using props and other visual aids to prevent the movie from becoming one long piece of dialogue (which it still kind of is, but we're okay with that).
Family Life
Family life plays a pretty big role in this movie, since it's focused on a kid who's been accused of murdering his father. The longer the movie goes on, the more we learn about how abusive this kid's father was, and what a terrible family life the kid grew up with.
We later learn that family life also plays a huge role in the opinions of Juror #3, the main antagonist in the movie. As #3 mentions, he was physically hard on his own son until one day, his son slugged him in the face and disappeared from his life. Now the guy has a grudge against any kids he sees as being disobedient, and that's a big part of why he's so desperate to get a Guilty conviction for the kid on trial.
Location
One of the big issues surrounding the kid on trial is the fact that he comes from some lower-class slums. Some of the jurors think that this is reason enough to convict him, since they believe that everyone who comes out of a slum is a future thief or murderer. But Juror #5 shuts them up when he reveals that he lived in a slum his whole life, and he turned out just fine. These kinds of arguments show that the jurors (in addition to being racially biased) can also be geographically biased, thinking that some people are worse than others because of the neighborhoods they come from.
Names
Names are significant in this movie, even though (or precisely because of the fact) that none are ever mentioned. The only two names we ever hear come in the very last scene of the movie, when Jurors #8 and #9 meet outside the courthouse and introduce themselves as Davis and McCardle.
The lack of names in this movie reminds us that it's not the individuals who matter in a jury room; it's the group as a whole and its role in the judicial process. Big principles like justice and democracy are too important to pin on any one person, so Reginald Rose (the screenwriter) makes the clever choice of never offering any names at all—perhaps with the hope that his audience will reflect a bit more on the bigger picture and not just on the individual characters.