Release Year: 1957

Genre: Crime, Drama

Director: Sidney Lumet

Writer: Reginald Rose

Stars: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam

Have you ever heard the expression herding cats? It's all about situations when you just can't seem to get people to agree on anything or coordinate their efforts. Like cats, people have strong and oh, let's just go ahead and say, stubborn personalities.

You could probably summarize the plot of 12 Angry Men as: "Herding cats… with life and death at stake." That's right: this is the story of one jury that just can't decide on a verdict. And why is that? Well, one man decides to take on a room full of really stubborn cats and get them to give a Not Guilty verdict for a kid they all think murdered his own father.

Enter Juror #8.

Here's a guy with a strong sense of justice and sympathy. Juror #8 wants to do everything he can to help the kid on trial for murder, and he stands up against all the other jurors who are convinced that the kid is guilty. It's not easy, but over time, Juror #8 uses all his smarts and moral arguments to convince these other jurors to change their minds. Oh, yeah, and along the way, he restores our faith in democracy and human goodness.

Not bad, eh?

Released in 1957, 12 Angry Men was nominated for three Academy Awards and got a pretty decent response from critics. On the other hand, it didn't do very well at the box office, since color films were just starting to come out, and people were less tempted to see an old fashioned-looking black and white flick like 12 Angry Men. It was only later, when networks started showing the movie on TV, that people really started getting behind the thing. You might even say that people started off with a really rigid attitude toward the movie, but then were slowly convinced to change their minds about it…

Sound familiar? (Pssst. It's just like the plot of the movie.)

Have you ever tried to make decisions with a group of people? How about a group of people who've been picked at random and who have completely different personalities and worldviews? Well, if you have, chances are that you've come to a point where you just wished that one person could step in and make decisions for the whole group.

There's only one problem with this wish, and that's the fact that you're basically wishing that you could get rid of democracy and go straight to a dictatorship.

What's wrong with a dictatorship? The first answer we'd have to come up with is one word—RISK. Sure, you might get yourself a really nice dictator who makes good decisions. But you're totally kaput if you get someone bad.

Just look at Juror #7 in this movie; a person who will pick any verdict as long as he can get to a baseball game before it starts. Is this the person you want deciding the life or death of another human being? It's for this reason that our juries tend to decide things democratically. Yes, it can get super annoying and time-consuming, but it's a whole lot better than what you might wind up with if only one person were in charge.

Okay, so now we've got ourselves a democracy, and we need to figure out how to make it work. That means we need to learn how to be patient and convincing in order to help sway a group's opinion—and that's where we can learn a whole lot from Juror #8 in 12 Angry Men. This is a person who is smart, observant, patient, and sympathetic—all things that you need to be if you're going to be successful in making decisions with a group.

It's true that you'll never really need to learn this stuff if your plans to become the Overlord of Earth pay off (if they do, remember who helped you with your homework oh benevolent one). But just in case that doesn't happen, why not curl up and watch 12 Angry Men?