In the middle of a war fought against foreign
dictatorships, the western The Ox-Bow Incident—released in U.S. theaters 75 years ago this week—delivered a somber warning:
Under the auspices of democracy, even a group of rambunctious individualists
can be manipulated by a bullying poseur into overriding the rule of law.
I remember watching The Ox-Bow Incident in sociology class in high school. It was like
dunking in ice-cold water a group of adolescents whose principal preoccupations
were the correct party to attend that weekend, Sunday afternoon football, and
catching the eye of the opposite sex every day of the week. The movie was
obvious—especially in a letter read by Henry Fonda that should have had
“MESSAGE” written all over it—but it was just the type of thing that kids
needed then.
Come to think of it, that lack of subtlety might be
the only way to get through to some adults today who need to heed the
movie’s caution that “law is the very conscience of humanity.”
The “incident” at the heart of the movie—the
lynching of three innocent men on the Nevada frontier in 1885—had particular
meaning for star Henry Fonda (left, in the attached image, with Dana Andrews, center), whose
witnessing of a similar event on the streets of Omaha at age 14 in 1919 inspired
his subsequent lifelong liberalism. (That episode is described in Scott Eyman's recent dual bio of lifelong friends Fonda and James Stewart, Hank and Jim.)
Now, with race riots bursting out in some of
America’s biggest cities and Japanese-Americans compelled into internment
camps, Fonda, screenwriter-producer Lamar Trotti, and director William Wellman wanted to signal, in unmistakable
terms, the dangers in disregarding laws and the rights of minorities.
Lynching, though reduced in number, was hardly
absent from either Americans’ memory or even short-term experience nearly a year and a
half after Pearl Harbor. The three recorded in 1943, as well as the 16 that
occurred in the 1941-45 war years, were, to be sure, a good deal lower than the
20 of 1935, let alone the postwar high of 83 in 1919.
But the attempt to pass federal anti-lynching
legislation had proven as futile as it was unrelenting. The last serious
attempt to do so, in 1938, had foundered when President Franklin Roosevelt decided he could not support the bill
lest it fracture a New Deal coalition that included a segregationist Southern
contingent on Capitol Hill.
Highlighting this situation in a western, seemingly
far removed from contemporary reality, seemed tailor-made for a cinematic
treatment more palatable to audiences. (Especially the year 1885, the last time
that the number of white lynching victims outnumbered black ones.) But just
about every studio in town rejected “Wild Bill” Wellman’s pitch.
As a last resort, the director took the treatment to
Darryl Zanuck. Wellman’s last
encounter with the Twentieth-Century Fox head had ended in disaster: a
fistfight on a camping trip. After getting over his surprise over hearing from
Wellman again, Zanuck called him back as promised within 48 hours and agreed
with him that it was a great project.
Even so, Zanuck was dubious about the commercial
prospects of such grim subject matter. He only ended up giving the green light
to the project for three reasons:
*Wellman’s prior record of commercial success;
*The director’s agreement to keep a tight lid on
costs, which would improve its slim chances of earning even a slight profit;
and
*A commitment on the part of Wellman to direct,
sight unseen, two other scripts of Zanuck’s choosing, in return for approving
Wellman’s dream project.
Within these restrictions, Wellman created an
admirably lean, taut western with a low budget that worked to its advantage.
At only 75 minutes long, the movie tells its story
swiftly, like a novella. The need to compress characters forced Wellman and
Trotti to combine characters and make them more complex—which worked especially
well for the African-American preacher Sparks (significantly, the first
character among the posse to vote against the lynching) and the mob’s Mexican
victim (played by a scene-stealing Anthony Quinn).
Moreover, instead
of the wide vistas that were a staple of the genre, Wellman began with shots of
a small town and the bar that served as a flash point of civilization before
switching to nocturnal scenes that symbolized the posse members’ individual and
collective descent into moral darkness.
Although 1885 was surely chosen as the date for the
novel and film because it was when the American frontier was still considered
open, it also happens to be the last year in which white lynching victims outnumbered
black ones. From this point on, the practice became overwhelmingly a weapon of
racial control. Viewing lynching as a realistic possibility on the frontier
enabled audiences to understand the stark issues this extrajudicial resort to
murder posed outside of a racial context.
Zanuck was correct about the film’s poor prospects.
From its earliest previews, audiences didn’t know what to expect and were not
happy with the film’s tragic ending. But he was also right that it was a story
worth telling. Critics hailed it immediately, and, despite its box-office
failure, it earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination. (Very unusually, the movie
earned no other Academy Award nomination besides that.)
Sometimes considered the first “serious” western
novel, The Ox-Bow Incident is also
considered the forerunner of the “psychological” and “allegorical” western film
genres. It dispensed with gunfights, guys in white and black hats,
confrontations with Indians, and cowboy heroes. Instead, it considered the
fragile circumstances by which men in society maintained the thinnest veneer of
civilization.
It starts from the first scene in the bar, and
hinges on the distorted sexual dynamics that will play a role in the later
resort to vigilante justice. Told that a woman he had an understanding with,
Rose, has unexpectedly skipped town, a drunken Gil (played by Fonda) ends up
pummeling another townsman and, in turn, is knocked out by the bartender. As
much in need of the restraints of the law as anyone else in town, he is also
left gravely aware that he is an odd man out. When sidekick Art Croft (played
by Harry Morgan) says they didn’t have to ride with the posse,
Gil responds testily: “Look kinda funny if we hadn't, wouldn't it?”
To satisfy the Hays Office, Hollywood’s censorship
arm, Twentieth-Century Fox was forced to make Gil into a less passive
member of the posse. The resulting changes helped solidify the Fonda’s image as
the personification of American decency and fighter against injustice, one that
he would enhance with 12 Angry Men, The
Wrong Man, and The Best Man.
Trotti’s script, like Clark’s novel, dispensed with
the usual genre clichés about the goodness of the common, uncorrupted man of
the West. The denizens of Bridger’s Wells are animated by displacement, fear, and
resentment of the outsider—all too malleable material for a cruel man with a
will to power like “Major” Tetley, who dresses up in a Confederate uniform even
though, Gil tells Croft angrily, he never served a day in the army.
Carter and Croft are buffeted by the same forces
afflicting the other members of the posse, though. Opening and closing shots of them riding into
town establish them as solitary drifters, with no standing in the community
that would allow them to effectively challenge Tetley or influence the posse’s
vote on whether to string up the unlucky trio they come across at night out in
the valley.
In fact, nothing stands out so much in the film as
the overwhelming ineffectuality of opponents of the lynching. The fiercest of
these, the elderly storekeeper Davies, is dismissed with, “Shut up, Grandma.
Nobody expects you to go.” Major Tetley browbeats his son into participating in
the posse with, “I’ll have no female boys bearing my name.”
The two potboilers that Zanuck got Wellman to make
in exchange for the director’s special project, Thunder Birds: Soldiers of the Air (1942) and Buffalo Bill (1944), are little remembered today. But many of the
great westerns to come that explored the psychology of westerners or that used
the West as allegorical settings for the issues of their time were made
possible by The Ox-Bow Incident: The Gunfighter, High Noon, The Naked
Spur, The Searchers, Vera Cruz, Cheyenne Autumn, The Wild Bunch, and
Unforgiven.
In trying to show readers how Germany, the country that
produced Goethe and Beethoven, could cause the mayhem of Kristallnacht, Clark set his tale
of a mob that yields up their individual consciences in a setting far closer to
home: the American West.
Those who doubt that such a tragedy—featuring a leader
who denounces opponents as weaklings, and followers too nervous or apathetic to
stand firmly in the way—can occur in today’s America have not paid much
attention to the news recently.
