There’s something very reassuring about watching a Henry Fonda movie. Once Upon a Time in the West notwithstanding, he was reliably such a safe and comforting figure playing honourable characters with a resonant sincerity you don’t always get from other A-list stars of the time. You can usually be assured also that it’ll be driven by potent themes of justice or morality as important to the real Fonda as they were to his characters. 12 Angry Men is of course the quintessential Fonda film in this regard, much as it is an ensemble piece, but The Ox-Bow Incident from fourteen years prior and which touches on much the same theme of sentencing the innocent, is similarly potent.
It was apparently the last film Fonda made before going off to fight in the war (he would subsequently make his post-war debut with another classic western, My Darling Clementine), and it was one he was notably passionate about given its’ serious subject matter and bleak yet powerful messaging. It’s based on a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Some sources point to it being lifted from a true story of a similar episode in Montana, and while I can’t find definitive proof for this, it’s entirely too believable something like this could have happened not just once, but in numerous towns across that old wild west. There is plenty of precedent after all for mobs going out and lynching innocent people for perceived wrongs. The only implausible detail about this story is that two of the three victims are white.
The Ox-Bow Incident definitely lacks the feel of a typical western movie for the time, realistically grounded and morally grey compared to the more dominant romantic brand of the genre. Fonda’s character, for as morally upstanding as he is, is not much the hero of the story –he’s a drifter who is swept up by the plot, not even framed as particularly special next to anyone else. The movies’ director, William A. Wellman, best known for directing Wings, had barely made any westerns before it, and that perhaps amounts to a strength in its’ distinctiveness. It doesn’t look half as good as anything by John Ford or Howard Hawks, there’s no thrill or adventure anywhere about it, and in fact it’s really quite depressing –to a degree I’m surprised was permitted in Code-era Hollywood.
It forecasts a different set-up from the beginning, with Fonda’s Gil riding into town accompanied by his sidekick Art, played by a shockingly young Harry Morgan from M*A*S*H. Both men are somewhat shabbily dressed with unshaven stubble –Fonda’s got the good guy-signifying white hat but he’s no sheriff or lawman, he’s merely an interloper, and not a particularly welcome one at that. He gets into a bar fight within the first fifteen minutes with a local who assumes him to be a cattle rustler. The folks in this town, Bridger’s Wells, Nevada, like to make unfounded presumptions, and are exceptionally judgemental and prejudiced. When they hear that a rancher has been killed and his cattle stolen, they are quick to form a posse to track down and punish the perpetrators. It’s all under the jurisdiction of the local Deputy (the Sheriff being out of town) –something which a judge points out is illegal. But the mob doesn’t care, Gil and Art join to avert suspicion, the danger posed by these people being rather tangible to them. Spurned on by pure vitriol, the townsfolk embark on this mission of revenge, not particularly caring who it is they get revenge on.
I’m reminded a lot of Frtiz Lang’s M, another story of a mob taking it upon themselves to exact vigilante justice on someone they deem to be a criminal with minimal evidence -viewed by the film with much the same disgust as The Ox-Bow Incident, only without a Fonda analogue to act as a kind of moral compass and the more complex ethical layer of their target actually being guilty. On the contrary, the targets of communal ire in this film are almost certainly innocent from the moment we first meet them: a terrified but firmly defensive Dana Andrews, an absent-minded old man played by Francis Ford, and a grim, silent Mexican played by Anthony Quinn. This trio are found with the cattle believed to be stolen in Ox-Bow canyon, and it’s not long before the crowd abandons any precepts of taking them back to Bridger’s Wells for a fair trial, deciding instead to have them hanged right there.
The noose is vividly employed on this movie. Its’ poster rather shockingly plants it as the “O” over the title as it characterizes angry, ugly villagers with other nooses hanging from a tree in the background. This mechanism of execution was perhaps not as publicly taboo an image in the 1940s, certainly not in the world of white Hollywood, but it still was profoundly striking to depict with such abandon. No doubt why some critics found the film to be abhorrent.
In the face of this terror, the three men are interrogated and certain revelations do come out. The fact that the man who was killed sold the cattle to them but without issuing a bill, a story that sounds very suspicious to the throng, but one that Andrews’ Martin is willing to testify to. Things become more tense when Ford’s Hardwicke out of sheer fear for his life, throws the Mexican under the bus but Martin valiantly comes to his defence. The Mexican is discovered to be a gambler called Morez and with a much stronger fluency in English than he initially let on. He also is in possession of a gun that the townsfolk believe once belonged to the deceased rancher. But as is pointed out frequently by Martin they have no proof of anything, and are simply lusting for an outlet for their aggression. It’s a keen understanding of mob mentality that really holds up. The grievances are blown out of proportion by those who just want a scapegoat and conduit for their violent impulses. We’ve seen it time and again and relatively recently, from people very much like those seen in this movie, who in some context could be considered approachable and ordinary. But that furious impulse drives them, and it certainly seems to be the case of one of the instigators, Civil War veteran Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), who doesn’t care that some of the logic doesn’t match up just so long as someone dies for the death of this man he in all honesty probably didn’t know terribly well. One of the few dissenters to the hate brigade is Tetley’s son (William Eythe), whom his father constantly emasculates -a relationship that fascinatingly veers into gender and sexuality politics by Tetley deriding him as “female”. Likewise uncomfortable with it all is Gil and Art of course, as well as Davies (Harry Davenport), the morally upright town elder not unlike Juror 9 of 12 Angry Men, begging the Major to have the captives tried legally.
This of course is not an option once the majority has decided the gun was stolen. Dread takes over the atmosphere as Wellman keys in on the innocents vainly vying for their lives. Andrews is the preeminent performer of this film if anybody is, the horror palpable on his face as his fate becomes more and more clear, and yet standing his ground with determination all the while. It’s impossible to think him guilty as he outdoes even Fonda for basic decency. Quinn also is typically great, less inclined to argue as much as escape, as though he’s been falsely accused before and knows there’s no reasoning with deep prejudice. Indeed while the film never delves into the specific racial component of the whole thing (though the mob is quite racist), it does linger noticeably, especially as read today where the connotations of racial motivation are impossible to separate from this kind of an action; and it renders the critical sequence all the more uncomfortable.
I was surprised when it did actually go there, Gil for as noble as a Fonda character usually is, being powerless to do anything to prevent the posse’s victory. In a brief but still morbid acquiescence to democracy, a vote is taken and only seven take the side of bringing the men to trial -it’s not even a vote of guilt or innocence, just whether or not to prosecute, and in the end most everyone just wants to see these people die. The lynchings themselves take place off-screen but they are still vividly disturbing, the cries of Hardwicke in particular resounding long after the scene cuts away.
The killers are barely out of the canyon and in celebration of what they’ve just done when they conveniently run into consequences in the form of the sheriff, who informs them the rancher was never even dead -he survived his wounds and the man who shot him has been promptly arrested. The townspeople have murdered three innocent men and are left to stew in that fact. The Major even commits suicide, after his son calls him out for his vital role in the incident. And to add insult to injury Gil reads a letter to some of the assembled mob that Martin had written to his wife wherein Martin expresses pity for them having to live forever with the knowledge of what they’ve done. It’s the most blunt part of this morality tale, where the movie most directly speaks to its’ audience, it’s central thesis explicitly transparent.
And it works because in 1943 it was just as cogent a message. Mobs like the kind in The Ox-Bow Incident were still surfacing into the twentieth century, especially in the American South where the seeds of whole hate movements were blossoming as this movie came out. What’s so chilling about the film is how genuine to life it seems, and how with just a few script changes it could be transformed from a history piece into a contemporary drama without losing any thematic power or believability. It’s a work designed perhaps to be more about the moral perils of mob justice than the human cost, appealing to those who might blindly partake, hence why everyone is so remorseful in the end (we know too well that many of their real-world counterparts have no such capacity for shame); but the sheer circumstantial horror with which it portrays their actions combined with a sharp sympathy towards their victims illustrates an understanding of the barbarism inherent to such an enterprise. The Ox-Bow Incident has relevance today even, the bellicose mob has proliferated as we have seen. They may not use nooses anymore (though some do), but they are still desperate to satiate a nebulous rage. The more movies to counter those notions the better.
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