Stereotypes In 12 Angry Men

After reading the play 12 Angry Men and watching the movie, it is easy to tell that some of the changes made in the movie makes it worse than the play. Reginald Rose wrote the characters to be less personal and more stereotypical in terms of their characteristics. In the movie, we get to know the jurors on a more personal level. For example at the end of the movie juror Eight and Nine are on the courthouse steps when they introduce themselves. This does not happen in the play because the playwright decides to show that the jurors were more like stereotypes of themselves (the bigot, the old man, the immigrant, ext.) and they were just hiding behind anonymity. It doesn't make sense for Eight and Nine to introduce themselves because the point

is to only see these types as jurors and how they bring their humanity and personal biases into the decision when they are not suppose to. Another way the movie was worst than the play was in the presentation of the evidence. In the movie the woman did not wear eyeglasses to court because they speculated she wanted to preserve her appearance, but in the play they said she wear her glasses to testify. By wearing her glasses in the play, it supported their reasonable doubt that she could not have been able to see the murder without her glasses. In the movie they stressed the point that she had marks from glasses on her nose and there was a debate on whether or not the women was near or far sighted. In the play Eleven says “the women wore bifocals”(Rose 64) and that would mean the woman was neither near nor far sighted, so this complication did not come up; thus making it a stronger piece of evidence in the play that the boy was not guilty. Overall these changes that were made in the movie made it worse than the play.