Ox-Bow Incident (DVD)

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It was unusual for the Hollywood of yesteryear to offer the public so gritty and realistic a Western as 1943's "The Ox-Bow Incident." Based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark that is still taught in many high schools and colleges around the country, the story is an uncompromising look at the horrific effects of mob violence and a mob mentality. Starring one of Hollywood's most respected actors, Henry Fonda, the movie can rightly be regarded as a genre classic and thereby takes its place in Twentieth Century Fox's line of "Studio Classics."

Yet the film is no museum piece or ancient artifact to be enjoyed only by film connoisseurs. It remains remarkably moving and highly entertaining, comparing favorably with any of today's so-called "message" pictures. But it is a message picture, make no mistake about it. The film has an agenda that it maintains with a dogged determination.

The story is set in Nevada, 1885, in as dusty a little cow town as you could imagine. Director William Wellman ("The Call of the Wild," "Beau Geste," "A Star Is Born," "The High and the Mighty") never shirks from showing us cowpokes who look and act like real cowpokes, not the sanitized, white-hatted protagonists of most other Westerns of the day.

As the movie opens, Gil Carver (Fonda) and his buddy Art Croft (Harry Morgan), two itinerant ranch hands, are seen riding into town to the music of "Red River Valley." John Ford had gotten a lot of mileage out of the melancholy tune a few years earlier in "The Grapes of Wrath," so Wellman reprises it here to set the tone for what will be a brief but decidedly somber seventy-five minute tale.

Fonda's Carver is no solid, heroic, upright citizen, either. He's an ornery cuss who gets in a bar fight moments after he arrives in town. Yet he's one of the few people in the story who has a conscience and uses it. You see, the plot involves the shooting of a well-liked local rancher by persons unknown, persons who also steal his cattle; and the good townspeople decide to go after the murdering, rustling varmints who did it and string 'em up, no questions asked. Well, the West was like that, and a lynch mob is formed to go after somebody, anybody, to satisfy their blood lust. Carver is all for it, too, just as long as they're sure they get the right culprits. Trouble is, once a makeshift posse finds the folks who supposedly did the deed, Carver isn't so sure anymore.

The movie becomes a treatise on the dynamics of mob rule and vengeance for vengeance sake, and for the last half of its running time it's as gripping as any movie around. Tensions run high as the posse corners its prey, Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn among those charged, in the little valley known as Ox-Bow. The accused men claim to be ranchers recently moved into the area who have just had dealings with the victim and just bought cattle from him. Their cattle has the victim's brand on them all right, but the accused have no deed of sale. It looks pretty incriminating, and the mob is unwilling to listen to reason.

Then comes the inevitable point at which the members of the posse must take sides: hang the accused on the spot or bring them in for a fair trial. Of the several dozen persons present, only seven stand against the hanging, Carver included. When the leader of the posse grumbles about Carver's objections to the executions, complaining that it's none of his business, Carver replies, "Hanging's any man's business that's around."

"The Ox-Bow Incident" builds to a shattering climax and is unrelenting, almost brutal, in its determination to be both realistic and faithful to the book. It postulates that each man must stand up, stand apart, and be counted in this life for what he knows is right, even if it means not following the will of the majority.

The plot digresses momentarily with the peripheral issues of Carver's ex-girlfriend and her new husband and of the weakling son of the posse's leader, but otherwise it remains on track. Taking its cue from the title, the movie is short and to the point, mainly following the one "incident" and wasting little energy on unnecessary characterizations or extraneous action. It's all the better and all the more effective for it.

Trivia notes
Harry Morgan, who plays Fonda's sidekick in the movie, is the same guy who co-starred for years as Officer Bill Gannon in television's "Dragnet" and Col. Sherman Potter in "MASH." Margaret Hamilton, uncredited as a grumpy housekeeper early on in the picture, would forever be playing grumpy ladies after her stint as the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard of Oz." And the familiar face of Jane Darwell, who plays the crusty old lady, Jenny Grier, dead set on hanging the accused, had already been seen in movies for over thirty years before "Ox-Bow" and would be seen for the next two decades as well. Among the actress's most famous roles were those of Dolly Merriwether in "Gone With the Wind" (1939), Ma Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940), Ma Stone in "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1941), Kate Nelson in "My Darling Clementine" (1946), and, amazingly, the ancient bird woman in "Mary Poppins" (1964).