When praising 12 Angry Men, people most often point toward three things: the preciseness of Sidney Lumet‘s direction; Reginald Rose‘s fat-free plotting and dialogue; and the set of performances, all great, found in its ensemble cast. Perhaps it speaks to their common and unique strengths that one only occasionally remembers those moments when an image, an expression, and a gesture cohere to tell the same story that words have been giving us.
Enter 12 Silent Men, a repositioning in which the people of Filmscalpel “isolated the shots in which no character is talking: the quiet lulls in the stormy debate and the wordless reaction shots,” in doing so hoping to tell a condensed version of the story. You won’t get everything — Rose’s screenplay is an awfully verbose one, as evidenced by the paring down from 96 minutes to six — but the amount of 12 Angry Men that gets retained is a big compliment to both the film (one which it sometimes seems there’s nothing new to say about) and the effort at hand.
Watch below: