The Ox-Bow Incident
February 11, 2004
When William Wellman’s “The Ox-Bow Incident” was released in 1943, the world was at war and Hollywood was producing a lot of films that, to say the least, were patriotic and uplifting. To see James Cagney dance as George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” or Humphrey Bogart stick it to the Nazi’s in “Casablanca” was to escape from a harsh reality that existed outside of the three comfortable cinematic walls. So, when Wellman’s highly praised western about the ugliness of mob justice, itself a thinly veiled parable of Nazism, opened to an audience expecting a blue and yellow clad John Wayne battling Indians beneath Monument Valley, it’s no wonder the film flopped, and was quickly shelved for years, before television, and a wiser film culture embraced it for the landmark that it is; the first, and possibly still the best anti-western of all time.
The film, which has recently been released on DVD as part of 20th Century Fox’s Studio Classics series, is a dark, expressionistic morality play about a lynch mob who are out to get a group of cattle rustlers they believe killed a local rancher. The issues involving western law, mob mentality, a failed belief in the justice system, and personal corruption and cowardice was damning, and it’s easy to see why audiences didn’t take to it at the time, and why Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck was so skittish about releasing it. True to form, Orson Welles loved it, “They don’t know what they just saw,” he told Wellman after a particularly nasty test screening, but Zanuck was nervous, and for good reasons.
For one, westerns by 1943 were primarily adventure stories, Cowboys and Indians fare with large outdoors vistas and dusty settings beneath a blazing sun, but “The Ox-Bow Incident” was a set-bound drama with dialogue driven characterizations and no discerning good guy. Sure, it stars Henry Fonda, an idealistic actor if there ever was (only four years removed from Honest Abe in “Young Mr. Lincoln”, and three from Tom Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath”), but his character is hardly a hero; he may stick up for the condemned men, but he doesn’t save the day, nobody does, and for a so-called western to focus the bulk of its action on a mock frontier trial and eventual hanging, in turn becoming a psychological study in morals and lack thereof, was rare and hard to handle. For that matter, it still is, but we’ve since become more cynical and jaded (Film Noir soon followed, changing everything) enough to expect the worst in people; Hitler, mob justice, Fascism, it’s all one big tumbleweed, and there we are with Fonda, helpless, waiting for the good to come, seep through and prevail, but surprisingly, it never does.
The film, based on the famous Walter Van Tilburg Clark novel, takes place in Nevada, 1885, where two cowboys have reappeared after years spent cattle ranching on the plains. On the day Gil Carter (Fonda) and Art Croft (Henry Morgan) ride into town, passing a curious brown stray dog on the cold, empty street word comes that Larry Kinkaid, a town rancher, has been murdered. With the sheriff out of town, the escalating crowd convinces the pigheaded deputy sheriff to join in a posse that will exact its own, quicker form of martial law. Gil and Art ride along, as to not look too suspicious, but they are two of the few men, including the elderly Mr. Davies (Harry Davenport) and the spiritual preacher, Mr. Sparks (Leigh Whippet) that will be the voice of reason, albeit an insignificant voice when the clan happens upon three men camping at the Ox-Bow, who are automatically found guilty by a makeshift and impartial jury.
The story has four movements, each one a Conradian voyage into a strange form of civil insanity. It starts in a small, one-saloon town where the posse is formed, and where we meet our primary characters, including Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), who still dresses in his Confederate uniform and extols an iron hand over his pacifist son, Gerald (William Eythe). The second section is the horse drive towards Ox-Bow, while the third, and the longest, is the capturing of the three men (a rancher, an old man, a Mexican outlaw), their pitiful pleadings and the inconsequential division of the posse, led by Gil. “This isn't slightly any of your business my friend,” says Major Tetley to Gil Carter. “Hangin' is any man's business that's around,” snaps Fonda, who, as a boy, witnessed a lynching that he undoubtedly used as motivation for his character’s anger.
Finally, the concluding movement is a kind of epilogue, which circles back on the dusty town, back to the saloon, that stray brown dog, and a poignant letter from Donald Martin (Dana Andrews), the hanged rancher, to his widow about the savagery of mob justice and the animalistic ways of this particular society. In a scant 75 minutes, Wellman’s film travels to hell and back in a short matter of day to night, and along the way the fabric of post Civil War society as an unruly and unfocused judicial mess foreshadows the rise of Fascism in Europe, while the destruction of the western as a heroic myth comes to bear in a shattering juxtaposition of morals, ethics, symbolism, and ultimately, character failure.
I call “The Ox-Bow Incident” an “anti” western because it was the first film that I can think of in the American cinema to present the themes and symbols of classic western lore and not glamorize them. The characters each represent a piece of the West, where if you went against the pack you were deemed effeminate. Gil is the loner who is supposed to prevail, but fails, just like Major Tetley (a failure at war and as a father) is somehow not entirely the villain, yet he makes a strong case in favor. By the end, nearly every character is on the same footing; they know an injustice has been done, there is even evidence to support it, but the heat of the moment was too much, the persuading Tetley was too convincing against the passivity of the dissenters and nobody could uphold the true meaning of justice.
Henry Fonda gives one of his best performances as Gil Carter. Like his more liberal and successful character in Sidney Lumet’s equally claustrophobic “12 Angry Men” (’57), Fonda’s character is sympathetic, but incredibly sullen and bitter about his ineffectiveness. His legend is sealed during the epilogue when he reads the dead man’s letter to the bar full of guilty men, with his eyes blocked from the camera’s vision by the brim of Art’s hat. “There can't be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience,” Gil reads with a deflated emotion, “because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience?” It’s a powerful and justly famous image, one that didn’t appear in the novel, but was added by Wellman and writer/producer Lamar Trotti to suggest the ultimate blinding of Lady Justice.
“The Ox-Bow Incident” had a long and bumpy ride to the theater after Wellman purchased it for 5,500 dollars from a friend. Studio after studio turned it down, it was too dark and unprofitable they’d say, but finally Darryl F. Zanuck (with whom Wellman had previously made the classic “The Public Enemy” in ’31) agreed to shoulder the film, on the condition that Wellman agree to direct two of his future pet projects. “Wild Bill”, as he was called, prevailed in keeping the tone of Clark’s novel in tact, with the aesthetics of the painted studio backdrops and legendary cinematographer Arthur Miller’s brilliant lighting techniques suggesting something altogether unreal about a subject all too real and problematic. It’s a raw psychological drama, ahead of its time, complete with inadequate characters and myth debunking, essentially, it’s an essential and one of the toughest and harshest social pictures of the studio era.
by Adam Suraf
“The Ox-Bow Incident” will be screened Tuesday night at 7 p.m. as part of the Buffalo Film Seminar at the Market Arcade Theater in downtown Buffalo.