The last film I saw in 2012, on New Year's Eve, was Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. Eleven of those men are pictured below. Who are they staring at? That would be the twelfth and angriest man in the jury room, the last to switch his vote to 'not guilty' and save a kid from the chair. An hour or so before this scenario, there were eleven men looking at Henry Fonda, though not with quite the same eyes. Most of them were angry at him for being an enigmatic loner and a party pooper, having refused to vote 'guilty' in what appeared to be a cut-and-dried murder case. But being Henry Fonda, he managed to change their minds pretty quick.
The first film I saw in 2013, on New Year's Day, was Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. In the shot below, three French soldiers are being tried in a kangaroo court. They've been placed there as scapegoats by the generals, who have trumped up some charges to camouflage their own murderous mistakes. Kirk Douglas, who is as big a superstar as Henry Fonda, does his best to defend the soldiers, but it's no good. The court officials are more barbaric than any enemy soldier, and the court itself has one purpose, which is to kill. Douglas isn’t able to change a single mind, despite delivering some very moving words.
Both films are set in strange worlds with no women, with the sole exception being the famous final scene in Paths of Glory. Men rule, and are ruled by other men. (In Australia, we call these settings 'sausage fests' or 'cock forests'.) The films are vastly different, but the unifying aspect is that they both feature noble men fighting for noble causes in ignoble environments. In other words, they're the ultimate recruiting tools for the legal profession. It's no coincidence that I saw these films back-to-back. Seeing one made me want to see the other; I wanted to be inspired by more noble men fighting for noble causes in ignoble environments.
12 Angry Men ends with an innocent man saved from execution, and Paths of Glory ends with three innocent men unable to be saved from execution. I wonder which scenario has been more inspiring for would-be lawyers over the years – the justice of the former or the injustice of the latter? I wonder how many lawyers have experienced the glory of their onscreen counterparts? The movies have promised them so much.