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12 Angry Men American Culture

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In my life I have watched hundreds of movies. One of my families favorite past times is sitting down and watching movies together, and since we don’t have Television I spend even more time watching movies. I enjoy watching movies from all ages of cinema, black and white, Technicolor, animated, etc. etc.. Through my parents influence on my movie experiences I have seen films that I probably never would have seen of my own discoveries. One such film is 12 Angry Men directed by Sidney Lumet. In the following essay I will look at this movie in detail and discuss the interaction between the film 12 Angry Men and some of the American culture and social tensions at the time that this film was made. 12 Angry Men was produced by Sidney Lumet and …show more content…
came into being. The middle class who had formerly been living near the inner city moved out of town and left only the poor to fend for themselves. “At the end of the 1950s, nearly one-fifth of the population lived below the poverty line. The poor included many groups” including “residents of inner-city slums……What Harrington called the culture of poverty—that is, living without adequate housing, food, education, medical care, job opportunities, or hope—remained.” (Other Americans,CountriesQuest) This was the time that 12 Angry Men was produced, a time when the inner-city slums were full of poor people whom the middle class looked down on; a time when the ghettos were created as the middle class moved out and away. The disparity between the middle and poor classes only increased because of this demographic …show more content…
The all white mostly middle class men in the jury room had varying views on the slum class. One of the jurors, juror three is against the kid from the start because of the boys slum background and the jurors own dislike of teenagers because of the alienation of the his son. Juror five is indignant of the others judgment against the slums because of his own slum background. A few of the jurors namely jurors ten, twelve, seven, six, and two mostly just go with the majority and aren’t extremely concerned with the case at

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