A Jury of Her Peers is a 1980 short film (30 minutes) directed by Sally Heckel.
A farmer, Mr. Hale, visits his neighbors the Burkes and finds the man in the house, John Burke, dead in his bed—strangled with a noose. Suspicion naturally falls on Burke's wife Minnie, who, speaking robotically as if she were in a trance, can say only that she must have slept through a stranger coming in to her bedroom and strangling her husband to death.
Sheriff Peters, Mr. Cook the county attorney, and Mr. Hale search the place, looking for evidence to tie Mrs. Burke to the crime or to at least figure out why she did it. Meanwhile, Sheriff Peters's and Mr. Hale's wives, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, go to fetch some things that Minnie has requested be brought to her in jail. Mrs. Hale knew Minnie well, and reflects on how Minnie, once a vivacious young girl who sang in the church choir, was beaten down in spirit by her cold, cruel husband. But the motive for the murder becomes quite clear when the two women find Mrs. Burke's pet canary in a box, dead of a broken neck.
This film was based on Susan Glaspell's 1917 short story "A Jury of Her Peers", which Glaspell had in turn adapted from her own one-act play, Trifles. Mark Margolis played Mr. Hale.
Tropes:
- Adaptational Name Change: In Glaspell's story, the dead man and his wife are named Wright.
- Ambiguous Ending: The film, like the story, ends before the audience finds out if Mrs. Burke is going to prison. But the implication is that after the other two women hid the evidence of the dead bird, Minnie Burke may beat the rap due to the lack of a motive.
- Broken Bird: Both literally and figuratively. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters find a literal broken bird, Minnie's pet canary, hidden away in a box. The bird with a broken neck is symbolic of Mrs. Burke, once a joyful young girl, who was left broken in spirit after years of loneliness and emotional abuse from a cruel husband.
- Caged Bird Metaphor: The canary in the cage symbolizes Minnie Burke, trapped in marriage to a cruel man.
- Chekhov's Gun: The women discover an empty bird cage, its gate broken and hanging off one hinge. Eventually they figure out that John Burke must have reached inside, taken the bird out of the cage, and killed it.
- Dead-Hand Shot: Mr. Burke's corpse is first shown with a shot of his dead hand dangling off the bed, before the next shot pulls back to a shot of him lying on his back.
- The Dog Bites Back: The years of abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband, culminating in him killing her pet canary, leads Minnie to murder him.
- Domestic Abuse: Whether or not John Burke physically abused Minnie is unknown, but he was emotionally abusive to her, treating her cruelly, and shutting her up in the farmhouse as basically a prisoner.
- Down on the Farm: A particularly grim tale of a farmer's wife, beaten down by the drudgery of unending toil and a cruel husband. Mrs. Hale notes that while John Burke was actually a pretty prosperous farmer and was able to put up a new barn, his wife was left in shabby, threadbare clothing.
- Extremely Short Timespan: There's the prologue where Mr. Hale pays a visit and finds John Burke dead, then the rest of the story unfolds in close to Real Time the next day, where the two women figure out exactly why the murder happened while the clueless men blunder around.
- Foreshadowing: Mr. Cook, in a smarmily sexist manner, suggests that the women have a look around the kitchen and says "You women might come up with a clue to the motive." They do.
- Kick the Dog: The last straw that drove Minnie to murder her husband was when he killed her pet canary.
- Let Off by the Detective: Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, from looking around Minnie's kitchen and the sitting room, figure out that she killed her husband after he killed her pet bird. They conceal the evidence of this (namely, the dead bird), out of sympathy for her and an obvious belief that John Burke had it coming.
- Live-Action Adaptation: Of Glaspell's short story.
- Posthumous Character: John Burke, who was cruel and emotionally abusive towards his wife, a cold man, a miser, and the kind of man who'd snap the neck of his wife's songbird.
