The Ox-Bow Incident (Fox, 1943)

Westerns that have little action, a lot of talking and are shot on studio sets, movies so static that they could be filmed plays, are by some movie-goers’ standards not proper Westerns at all. Yet sometimes a Western ‘play’ comes along that is a truly great film and The Ox-Bow Incident is one such.

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Of course the film has Henry Fonda in it and is therefore strong, tough and moving. His stand for justice is all the more effective because he is just an ordinary cowpoke, apt to drink and fight. Nebraska-born Fonda was fourteen years old when he observed a lynching. He watched a mob from the second floor window of his father’s print shop. “It was the most horrendous sight I’d ever seen… We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence. My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope.” Fonda made several films condemning the evil of lynching and questioning capital punishment in general.

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But there are fine supporting actors too. Frank Conroy, as the leader of the mob, decked out in his Confederate uniform, is a swine, as despicable for his treatment of his own sensitive son (William Eythe) as he is for his perversion of justice. But the worst of the rabble is a fat woman, brilliantly played by Jane Darwell, very effectively cast against type, who jokes at the condemned men’s expense and sits with another odious member of the lynch mob and cackles as the victims are condemned. She is frankly chilling. What makes these members of the lynch mob so especially appalling is their total lack of respect for either human life or for justice. The preacher is pathetically ineffectual. Fonda and his cowpuncher friend Art (Harry Morgan), along with a decent store keeper, Harry Davenport, are observers and though they stand against it, they do not intervene. The men are hanged.

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Of the three victims, Dana Andrews is moving and the great Francis Ford full of pathos as the feeble-minded old man but Anthony Quinn is outstanding. It is extraordinary how Quinn could bring such power to a ‘minor’ role. The movie observes the classical unities and is a tragedy in the true sense. It is a whole (notice how the two riders come in at the beginning and a dog crosses the street and you have a mirror image of this at the end).

While the film impressed some critics and even garnered an Academy Award nomination, it bombed at the box-office. Some viewers were respectful but few ‘entertained’. Harry Morgan was concerned about audience response at the première, but Orson Welles told him, “They don’t realize what they just saw”. Two years before, Welles himself had undergone similar reactions when Citizen Kane came out.

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Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote, “William Wellman has directed the picture with a realism that is as sharp and as cold as a knife. The Ox-Bow Incident is not a picture which will brighten or cheer your day. But it is one which, for sheer, stark drama, is currently hard to beat.”

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At the turn of our own century, Japanese film critic Toshi Fujiwara called it “one of the most important westerns in the history of American cinema.” Clint Eastwood has repeatedly called Ox-Bow one of his favorite films.