Many, many years ago, when I was an undergraduate majoring in journalism, I decided to enroll in an elective class entitled "Film and Literature" offered by the English Department. It turned out to be one of the most demanding and most rewarding classes I ever took at the university level. I learned so much about how to understand and interpret a film from that class, and I looked forward each Wednesday night to the screenings we had in the School of Architecture's auditorium. This was a bit before the days of videotape being so widespread, so we were watching 35mm prints of most of the films. For three of the movies, we also read the books, A Clockwork Orange, A Passage to India, and The Ox-Bow Incident.
I had read Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel of The Ox-Bow Incident, based upon a series of true events, before we watched the film. As powerful as the book is--and it is a gripping story--the movie was a more powerfully emotional experience. It begins with Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan's characters riding into town (after a dog crosses their path) and ends with them riding out of town (with the dog crossing the road after they leave). Between those parallel moments, the plot moves very precisely as a posse, acting upon a report of a rancher's death, goes in search of his murderers. When they find three men outside of town with cattle bearing the rancher's brand, the posse decides to hang the three rather than take them back and let the "slow" court system convict them.
There are only seven men in the large posse who attempt to keep the mob from carrying out its plans, but they are all quickly dismissed by the overwhelming sentiment of majority rule. Harry Davenport as Arthur Davies is the chief spokesman for this side; Davenport played supporting parts in dozens of films, but he was never better than he is here as a man who knows he cannot save three men from a brutal hanging, who tries everything he can to see that justice is actually meted out fairly. Fonda is great as Gil Carter too; he was always at his best when portraying a man with a strong moral center, a man with a clear sense of right and wrong. He and Morgan's Art Croft have some great scenes together, and their interplay shows a strong sense of friendship.
Two of the "convicted" men are also familiar faces. A young (and quite beautiful) Anthony Quinn plays Juan, a man whose past seems to have caught up with him at last. You might take note of the looks Quinn's Juan gives Major Tetley's son; either he's making fun of the younger Tetley for his decidedly unmasculine ways, or there is some sexual tension between them (I prefer to think the latter). The "leader" of the three men who are captured, Donald Martin, is played by Dana Andrews. I met Andrews while I was still a student in Mississippi. He had come to the campus to take part in a film festival in his honor; he was born in Mississippi, after all. I got a chance to interview him for an article, and I watched a series of his movies, including The Ox-Bow Incident for a second time. He was always a reliable actor, especially in roles like this or in The Best Years of Our Lives, roles that gave him a chance to show a range of emotions.
This film is obviously about our concepts of justice, about vigilantism, about the will of the majority. It's also a very intriguing examination of masculinity. I've already mentioned Major Tetley's son, who is forced into participating in the posse's actions by his father, a monomaniacal former Army officer. He tells his son at one point, "I'll not have no female boys bearing my name." He seems to think that the traits of violence and brutality are keys to being a man, yet the way he is depicted in the film clearly suggest that he is no role model for appropriate masculine behavior. There are other characters who state what they think men are expected to do in a situation like this, and some who question whether the choices they are making are appropriate for men to make. Oddly enough, Jane Darwell's Jenny Grier, the only woman to join the posse and a rather "butch" one at that, has to take the whip used to drive the horses away from the hanged men after all of the others refuse. I find it particularly odd that this film was released in 1943, in the middle of America's involvement in World War II, yet it doesn't take a typically macho posture to what a man should do. In fact, if anything, it raises more questions about men's roles than it settles.
I still think this was one of the best westerns ever made by Hollywood. Although it uses many of the generic conventions associated with those movies, it frequently calls them into question as well. And Fonda's reading of the letter Martin writes to his wife is one of the most heartbreaking sequences in film; the other men, all toughened by the life on the frontier, can barely hold their heads up while he reads. This certainly seems a very downbeat choice for one of the Best Picture nominees of 1943, but enough members of the Academy recognized the quality of this film. Surprisingly, Best Picture was the only nomination for an Oscar that the film received that year.
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