[the ox-bow incident]

William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident will come as a revelation to those who have only seen B fare Hollywood westerns. It's more artistically made than most westerns, and the dialouge is suprisingly crisp, realistic, and about as untheatrical as old Hollywood gets. It's also more dramatically powerful than most films of the 1940's can lay claim to. Along with the darkly comic The Westerner, The Ox-Bow Incident richly deserves to be called one of the greatest westerns of the 1940's.

Surprising, it comes from such a low name director, but low name directors were really the greatest back then. The studio approved directors always worked within an artistic bubble that leaves many young used to modern cinema bored stiff. The dialouge tends to be all written from the same, very small dictionary, the composition of shots is lazily and carelessly done, and there is often a sense of a single score being reused for nearly every single film since film's started being scored for 20 years.

So it will come as a shock to those who have only toed the waters of this decade to disocver something as imaginative, clasically beautiful, and disturibng as Ox-Bow. Wellman builds an atmosphere of dread slowly and deliberately. You keep thinking: they wouldn't really do it, would they?

Would they? Quietly devastating and original in many aspects and points, Ox-Bow deserves a serious round of applause. Like the fact the story isn't just used as a tool to demonify the lower class - indeed, the first man to demand the creation of the posse is the second best dressed man in the film. Shocking, too, the protagonist (Henry Fonda) at first joins the posse, and does not speak out against it for a while. Also shocking, is the fact the details of the crime are never revealed in full. We only know a man who is probably innocent has to die.

It's not a statement against democracy. To call it that would be an insult to the filmmakers intelligence. Rather, it's a statement against rashness and stupidity. It's not a statement for The Law, it's a statement for law. Viewers today will understand it even more than viewers might have understood it then, which makes it all the better viewing.

Rating: [4 stars]