The Ox-Bow Incident

“Ultimate democracy . . . is really a tyranny divided among a multitude of persons.” — Aristotle, Politics

The Ox-Bow Incident is a morality tale about modern law and justice. It is such a morality tale that two things unusual for Westerns occur. First, Henry Fonda, our main character and starring role, is subordinated to the mob that he joins. Second, the movie clearly eschews romance by quickly bringing on and whisking off a love interest for Fonda, which tells us that Politics is more important than Love here. The Ox-Bow Incident was released in the middle of WWII (1943), and frankly we were puzzled that a studio released a non-propaganda film like this. It’s even prescient about ex post facto law being applied to the Nuremberg trials. The clear difference between this movie and other Westerns is that it uses a questionable mob instead of a singular hero out for justice/revenge, which provides a nice antidote to impersonal Man-With-No-Name shoot-em-ups starring Clint Eastwood.

The story moves quickly (the 75-minute running time is rather nice for those with crowded schedules). Fonda and his sidekick ride into town and enter a saloon. Soon after, the men in the town get riled up about a reported murder outside of town. A heterogenous lynch mob forms, featuring our star, a burly old woman, a black preacher, and an ex-Confederate soldier named Tetley. Most, but not all, are bloodthirsty. When they find three men camping out in an ox-bow, a sort of kangaroo court forms. What happens next forms our law-and-justice moral. We will report no more about it, except to say that this lynch mob thinks it’s lawful. It sticks to a semblance of the legal procedures it knows, as when the sheriff’s deputy deputizes all of the mob’s members. Tetley takes on the crucial leadership role, and he demands majority rule. Despite this, the mob is clearly practicing sham justice. They eschew the Biblical rules of accepting at least two or three witnesses and presuming the accuseds’ innocence. They are, in short, a democratic tyranny.

We had the disadvantage of reading the Walter Van Tilburg Clark novel that this movie is based upon, and to us the differences between a book and its movie still applied (the one always being far better than the other). Fonda’s sidekick is the narrator in the novel, a semi-trustworthy teller of events whose injury during the course of events is meaningful and impacts his taletelling. In the movie, however, this sidekick is a pointless character who receives a pointless injury. Also, in the book Tetley is a little complicated, but in the movie he’s an inhuman monster. The C.S.A. pin always easily visible on his hat, his status as a Southern gentlemen and mob leader displaces the movie’s application of its moral, changing it from a contemporary political critique to a commentary on the history of the American South, which we’ve been beat over the head with all of our lives.

Yet the movie does do one thing better: it gets right Fonda’s response to events at the very end. As a sort of accomplice to the mob, he has a burdened conscience, and that spurs him to go beyond the actions of James 1:27. Unlike John Wayne’s and Clint Eastwood’s many film characters, this is a hero we can learn from.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 6
Morality: 8