THE OX-BOW INCIDENT A
USA (75 mi) 1943 d: William Wellman
Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It's everything people ever have found out about justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very conscience of humanity. There can't be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody's conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived?
—Donald Martin (Dana Andrews)
One of the few westerns to be selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress National Film Registry, a personal favorite of both Henry Fonda and Orson Welles, where the release date of May 1943 seems significant, as the nation was at war on two battlefronts, where the idea of fighting for freedom and justice against the forces of tyranny held a particularly prominent position in the lives of Americans. Nominated for an Academy Award, the last Best Picture nominee to receive a single award nomination, the ultimate winner was the beloved CASABLANCA (1943), considered one of the greatest and most popular films ever made, while this film did not do well at the box office. CASABLANCA gained all the glory, and rightly so, but the power of this little film was often forgotten or ignored until television viewings brought it attention and renewed critical acclaim. This may also be one of the best examples of the beauty of mythmaking, as this story is so perfectly told that it’s hard to tell whether this incident is mythical or based on fact. Spare and uncompromising, this is a haunting tale about a lynch mob’s fateful rush to judgment in Western Nevada of the 1880’s, hanging three innocent men for a murder they didn’t commit, becoming a powerful indictment against prejudice and the spread of rampant mob hysteria. The ramifications still send a repugnant air of disbelief, where perhaps the beauty lies in the reverential pause afterwards, a self-examination and somber reflection on law and order as well as culpability. Adapted by Lamar Trotti from Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s 1940 novel, something should be said about the novelist, a Reno writer in residence for most of his life, whose father was the President of the University of Nevada, where in the 50’s the author briefly became a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana. The Ox-Bow Incident was his first published novel and is often considered the first modern western, as it’s concise, psychologically taut and gripping throughout without resorting to formula or cliché, a timeless and iconic story about lawlessness in the American West and the need for moral order.
The film was actually shot directly after Henry Fonda’s career defining performance in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), receiving a deferment to make the film before enlisting in the Navy afterwards, where he served for three years, but 20TH Century Fox executives refused to release the movie, terrified of its incendiary political implications, so it sat on the shelf for two years. Gary Cooper turned down the lead role due to the objectionable material and the somewhat radical use of a black preacher as the moral voice of reason apparently made many white viewers uncomfortable. For such a short and downbeat film, only 75 minutes, plenty happens, where the writing and direction are near perfect, creating a grim, ultra realistic look quite ahead of its time without a touch of false sentiment, going against the grain with an unglamorous story that has little action to speak of, but could be considered an anti-Western, moving away from those immense landscapes of Indian wars, gunfights, stagecoach robberies, or outlaw shoot outs, narrowing the focus, becoming smaller in scope, literally exposing a defining moment when no heroes rush in to save the day. It’s an unusual opening, featuring a rougher than usual Fonda along with his sidekick Henry Morgan (who is the main character in the book, reversing roles) as they hit town after a long winter’s absence from a cattle drive. As they stand at the bar and stare at a provocative picture hanging overhead, they sip whisky while lost in thought, barely uttering a word, yet both exhibit a wry comical flair that provides a nice prelude, a calm before the storm, as news suddenly arrives that a local cattleman has been shot, where a makeshift posse, which is really a lynch mob already gathering on the street, is formed by the deputy, as the sheriff is already out of town investigating cattle rustling. Several men attempt to quell the erupting emotions, noting the sheriff is already on the scene, but the appearance of Major Tetley (Frank Conroy) and his twisted view of events alters the balance, a friend of the deceased all dressed up in his Confederate uniform, exuding authority and leading the charge for exacting revenge. The entire town in this desolate region consists of only twenty or so men, yet the performances all around are chillingly effective, using simple characters with plenty of dialog evenly spread around, continually establishing various points of view, where there isn’t a second of wasted time.
Except for an exterior opening and closing, and a beautiful transition shot into the mountains, the film is shot largely on an interior set with painted backdrops, the site of the hanging tree where people sit around and commiserate about what’s to be done, creating a stifling atmosphere of impending doom that couldn’t feel more intensely claustrophobic, where humanity runs amok with the stink of its own foul deed. There’s seemingly nothing that can change the ominous momentum of outright horror from majority rule, an expression of civilization run off its rails, yet given a certain poignancy from unexpected sources, namely the Major’s son, Gerald (William Eythe), who has a small but influential role, as he refuses to be bullied by his overbearing father and actually offers a rare smile of compassion to one of the prisoners. The other is the older pastor Sparks (Leigh Whippet), a black man who witnessed the lynching of his brother when he was a boy, whose sole purpose in being there is praying for the men who are about to die. His spare renditions of Negro spirituals are not pretty, but sound raw and sorrowfully rough-edged, becoming hauntingly effective, a powerful contrast to the otherwise brutally swift proceedings. Despite the outcry of a few, including Fonda, who’s gun is taken away from him, the sentiment of the majority is bloodlust, actually led by the terrifying cackles of Ma Grier, Jane Darwell as a lynch-loving frontier woman. A young Anthony Quinn as a Mexican is one of the captured men, who cleverly hides his long-standing criminal background behind his feigned lack of English, but once the mob’s intentions become clear, in perfect English he proudly and defiantly confesses to knowing seven languages, but resolutely refuses to confess in any one of them as he digs a bullet out of his leg by himself, muttering with contempt “This is fine company for a man to die with.” Dana Andrews as Donald Martin is the leader of this arrested group of three, contending he has a wife and kids at a farm nearby that he recently purchased, where they allow him to write his wife a letter before they hang them. When they run into the sheriff afterwards, their gleeful mood quickly sours when they learn the dead man is alive and well, merely injured, and the shooter arrested. The hushed scene at the bar at the end with all of the shamed men lined up for shots of free whisky is an enshrined moment, especially the reading of Martin’s letter (Fonda, with his face blocked by his friend’s hat) which casts a poetic eloquence on their eternally damned souls. Curiously, the contents of the letter are never revealed in the book, so it was composed by screenwriter Lamar Trotti and remains the high point of the film.
