William A. Wellman’s western about a lynch mob is short, dark and still frightening, because everyone in it sounds reasonable. The sets are plainly sets and the ending is over-written, but Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews carry it.
William A. Wellman made westerns before this one and after it, and The Ox-Bow Incident is barely a western at all. A rancher is reported shot, and the film turns into 76 minutes of men deciding whether to hang three strangers. Lamar Trotti, who produced it and wrote the script from Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel, throws out nearly everything that is not that decision. It is a fine, hard, short film that still frightens. Most people should see it.
What Wellman is after is a lynching with no villain. Nobody in Bridger’s Wells is a monster. Major Tetley (Frank Conroy) wants to be obeyed; Jeff Farnley (Marc Lawrence) wants somebody to pay for his friend; Ma Grier (Jane Darwell) wants a night out; most of the rest are there because staying behind would look like cowardice. Arthur Davies (Harry Davenport) and Judge Tyler (Matt Briggs) say the right things about the law and are beaten not by better arguments but by the hour. It is late, it is cold, the sheriff is away. Trotti’s dialogue is best here, because the sensible men lose for sensible reasons.
Arthur Charles Miller shot nearly all of it at night, indoors, with the mountains painted on cloth behind the riders and the valley’s one tree lit like a stage. The sets look like sets. That bothered us for ten minutes and then stopped, because there is no landscape here to ride off into, only faces in lantern light and dark all round them. Allen McNeil cuts the long argument in the valley slowly, resting on the men who are not talking. Cyril J. Mockridge’s music is kept mostly to the beginning and the end; the middle hour plays to wind, hooves and boots on frozen ground. Earl Luick and Sam Benson put Tetley in an old officer’s coat and Ma Grier in a man’s trousers, and each tells you what its wearer has decided to be tonight.
Henry Fonda plays Gil as the man who knows it is wrong and cannot make himself say so loudly enough. He spends the film about to speak, and the film is largely about why he does not. Dana Andrews, as Donald Martin, is the one who got to us. Martin has a wife, two children and a bill of sale he cannot prove, and Andrews plays him angry first, then reasonable when anger fails, then pleading, and lets you see him despise himself for the pleading. There is a moment when he asks for a little time and half the posse looks away, embarrassed, as though he were being rude. We were horrified, and not by the rope. It was the embarrassment. Anthony Quinn, as the Mexican among the three, plays a man who has been in this position before and has settled on contempt as the last thing they cannot take from him.
The flaws are real. Mary Beth Hughes turns up as Rose Mapen for one scene on the road, newly married, so Gil can be wretched about her, and it stops the film dead. William Eythe, as Tetley’s son Gerald, is written as the conscience the film does not need and plays every line as if it had been underlined for him. And Trotti hands a character a piece of writing near the end that is more thoughtful and better spelled than the man who is meant to have written it could have managed; we will say no more about it.
Set beside the westerns around it, this is an oddity: no chase, no shoot-out, and a running time most studio pictures would have padded. Set beside films about crowds, it holds up better than nearly all of them, because it never lets the crowd be stupid. It came out in 1943, when the world had recent evidence of what men will do once enough of them are standing together in the dark, and the film does not mention that and does not need to.
Watch it with somebody you argue with. Then see how long it takes one of you to start talking about the posse as if it were people you know.
