Admission $4.50 for single or double bill

“You can hear the producer wanting to be convinced. A bare room, a table and twelve guys talking? It promised to be so cheap, but could it be a movie too? I have some doubts about how good the movie is, but it was a small sensation in 1957 and one of the best demonstrations that television material could translate to the big screen. Whatever jurists think about the film, it is still used in the training of managers and salesmen, which may suggest that it works dramatically in terms of persuasion and manipulation, rather than as a tribute to the rigor and mysterious rightness of justice. It is so set up, it is hard to see it as a call for tolerance and doubt. The picture seems liberal--in that a poignant, minority accused is eventually acquitted thanks to the unimpeachable, white-suited eloquence and reason of Henry Fonda. A deeper meaning may be that any jury can do a flip-flop in ninety minutes. That need not prevent us from enjoying and observing the acting in this most mathematically duodecimal of films.” David Thomson