Last night I watched the classic film 12 Angry Men. I’d never seen it before for some crazy reason. A terrific, riveting movie, tightly shot and edited, and every single performance a reminder of what it was like when actors had faces. Not just pretty, symmetrical faces, but craggy faces, hard faces, soft, pudgy, big-nosed, squint-eyed, wrinkled up, sweaty, smirking faces. 
Anyway. The movie is wonderful not just because of the acting, or the directing, but because of the point it makes about our judicial system. At first, eleven of the men are ready to say “guilty” and go home, because the accused fits a certain type–and the crime he’s accused of is so dreadful that the jurors are ready to assume his guilt as a forgone conclusion. It takes Henry Fonda’s gentle persistence and logic to gradually change the men’s mind, and to remind them that no matter what the crime, no matter who the accused, in our legal system guilt is never a forgone conclusion, and that we all have the right to a fair trial where we are innocent until proven guilty.
Someone should remind Wolf Blitzer of this.
