The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) Still a powerful, morality Western 75 years later (Review)

The introduction is one of the most underrated aspects of home video. One as good as Peter Stanfield provides on Arrow’s release of William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident transforms a film – providing a context, drawing attention to details and being about the most proactive way to enhance a film. The author of “Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930’s” explains that the face of the Western in the early 40s was focused on family values, The Ox-Bow Incident was one of the earlier examples of the B-Movie Western tailored towards an older, more discerning crowd. Films such as this only saw the light of day through the casting of a name as established as Henry Fonda, in a role that counted among his favourites.

Based on a Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel of the same name, The Ox-bow Incident is set in a small Nevada town where tensions are running high from the increasingly bold cattle rustlers preying upon their part of the world, things eventually come to a boiling point when community figurehead and cattle farmer Larry Kinkaid is murdered. Frustrated by the local law enforcement questionably ‘chastising’ the townsfolk and their version of justice. The residents pounce in the sheriff’s absence, form a lynch mob and head to Ox-Bow Canyon. They finally find three men they believe to be guilty – including Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn – bestowing upon them their own distorted sense of justice.

Being both a morality play and B-Movie, Lamar Trotti’s script is fantastically economical. The only deviations from the accusations that the furious medley level at the unassuming threesome comes from the philosophical pondering of what a painting hanging over the local bar means and the reason for Fonda’s Gil to return home. Gil wanted to return home to reclaim his old flame, marrying her, and it goes nowhere almost betraying the escalation of the Western and the noir ideals that inform the Ox-Bow Incident. Borrowing the chiaroscuro black and white of the noir imparts a restless atmosphere, Cinematographer Arthur Miller recalls the best noir in their use of shade and shadow to convey the treachery hiding in plain sight as well as the black and white parameters the lynch mob are operating within.

Wellman was implausibly prolific, directing 82 films between 1923 and 1958, many of which are regarded as classics of their respective genres (A Star is Born & Public Enemy) or the first film to win what would later become the Best Picture Oscar (Wings). Not to be dismissive but these films are very much of their time, still excellent but their power comes from entertainment and spectacle than grit. And that is just the word to describe The Ox-Bow Incident, even at 73 minutes the film still has the ability to sink its fist into the gut. The unyielding belief that these three men with circumstantial evidence (at best) killed Larry Kinkaid and that punishment must be dished out, it’s powerful now so at the time it was no surprise that one critic called it a “depressing, unpleasant, at times horrible, melodrama”.

Melodrama may be a touch excessive, yet depressing, unpleasant and horrible are words that aptly describe the Ox-Bow Incident, however, there is one thing that many films that openly cavort with misfortune don’t have and that is Henry Fonda. As the accompanying TV documentary “Hollywood’s Quiet Hero” states, Fonda had a heart and humility in even the most unlikely of circumstances, he and a small group of others play out a trial run for the reasoned morality play that Fonda returned to later with Lumet’s transcendent 12 Angry Men.

The finale in the Western is often saved for shootouts, melodrama or even both in some wild cases. While there is a touch of the latter, Wellman through Van Tilburg Clark’s source text creates a thoughtful and pummeling dramatic crescendo, which while bleak is more accessible than that which genre aficionados will be accustomed to. Spaghetti Westerns tread similar grounds, but they didn’t really take hold of the old west (or whatever part of Italy, Mexico or Spain doubled up for it) for a few more decades. It takes an incredible film to maintain every iota of its power ¾ of a century down the line and William A. Wellman’s [the] Ox-bow Incident is just that. For a Hollywood film of the 1940s, there are remarkably few films that go for the throat as this ending does.

Thanks for reading our review of The Ox-Bow Incident

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