The Oxbow Incident

 An economical and bleak anti-lynching film, The Oxbow Incident (1943) encourages us to detest the detestable.  William Wellman's picture is effective, but, ultimately, I think, more than a little dishonest.  At a time when there were many lynchings of Black men, The Oxbow Incident dramatizes the extra-judicial killing of two White men and a Mexican.  (Traditionally, Hollywood has avoided depicting lynchings involving African-American victims -- this is because these killings ordinarily involved allegations of rape and would have alienated audiences in the American South.  The two most noteworthy anti-lynching films made during Hollywood's Golden Age were Fury (1938) and The Sound of Fury (1950) -- both movies that are based upon the 1933 lynching of two White men, Thurmond and Holmes, alleged to have kidnapped and murdered a young man in San Jose.  Both of these films are estimable:  Fury was made with Spencer Tracy by Fritz Lang; The Sound of Fury is one of Cy Endfield's last American films, made before the director was blacklisted and had to emigrate to England).  The Oxbow Incident, based on a 1940 novel by William van Tillburg Clark is nominally a Western and stars Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan as the two cattle-tramps caught up in the lynching -- but the film is atypical as a Western and, with a few exceptions, doesn't look (or feel) much like a film in that genre.  It's a classic Hollywood "message" movie, complete with a moral written in the form of a last letter to wife and children penned by one of lynching victims (played by Dana Andrews); Henry Fonda reads the letter at the film's climax to drive home the point that lynching is bad and that the law is our bastion against chaos and injustice and there's a bit of the tone Fonda's final peroration as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940).

Two cow-punchers ride into a small village in western Nevada.  A mangy dog trots across the screen as they ride down the hamlet's dusty main street.  In a bar, the cowboy played by Fonda bemoans the fact that a woman that he admires, probably a prostitute, is no longer in town.  There's a lack luster fist fight and, when Fonda's character, is waking up (after being knocked senseless by a bottle was broken over his head), a couple of men ride into town hell-for-leather crying out that a prominent local rancher has been found shot dead in a dry gulch and his cattle rustled.  The townsfolk assemble a ridiculously large posse -- probably fifty men under the leadership of a man who claims to have been a Confederate officer:  he sits ramrod straight on his horse, just like Robert E. Lee on Traveler.  A local lawyer and judge decry the pursuit of the murderers by the posse who has become an openly avowed lynch mob.  Fonda and his buddy are caught up in the posse, although they have reservations about the enterprise.  In a desolate canyon, three men are found sleeping in the cold by a fire.  These men include a young cowboy with a wife and two children living on a ranch nearby, a Mexican (played with suitable arrogance and ferocity by Anthony Quinn) and a confused old man.  Circumstantial evidence points to the men's complicity in the murdered rancher's death.  After much debate, a vote is taken as to whether the men should be brought back to town for trial or lynched from a convenient tree on the spot.  Only seven of the 50 members posse stand against the lynching and so the three men are summarily strung-up and, then, shot as they strangle to death.  As the lynch mob rides down off the mountain, they encounter a couple of riders who tell them that the rancher who was allegedly murdered wasn't killed at all and is apparently alive and well.  The mob rides back to the town.  The Confederate officer who looks like General Lee commits suicide after being denounced by his apparently homosexual and effete son -- the old man made his son participate in the murders to prove his manliness.  The rest of the mob sit in the bar glumly drinking whisky.  The local sheriff tells them that they will have to live with their mistake for the rest of their lives but that he isn't going to have anyone prosecuted.  Fonda and his buddy ride out of town as the same mangy dog crosses the screen again, this time sauntering across Main Street in the opposite direction.

The film is grimly effective with respect to its portrait of vigilante justice.  The lynch mob is comprised of many ordinary men but among them are some grotesques -- a toothless old drunk sadistically dramatizes the imminent lynching by twisting his neck, grimacing and bugging out his eyes; Jane Darwell plays a vicious matron in jeans on horseback toting a big shotgun -- she's horrible but so vividly acted that she exudes a sort robust gusto, a bit like a horseback Wife of Bath, and her sneering performance is marvelous and perversely engaging and, even, attractive.  There's an absolutely pointless subplot involving Henry Fonda's former girlfriend whom we meet dismounting from a stagecoach on a narrow canyon defile -- there's been some gunplay based on mistaken assumptions that the posse is band of robbers (true enough in a  way) and Harry Morgan is slightly wounded.  Fonda has an encounter with a orotund San Francisco lawyer, who may or may not be aware, that his bride is a saloon girl.  The girl vamps a little for Fonda, and the lawyer, who is courtly, extends the cowboy an invitation to his San Francisco manor -- none of this has anything to do with the lynching and, after a five minute scene, the woman and her attorney husband vanish from the movie with no consequence at all on the principal plot.  (It seems that this episode may be an artifact from the novel although summaries of the novel that I have read don't mention this aspect of the story either.)  One expects that Fonda and his sidekick may know the identity of the real murderer, or may even be implicated in the man's killing, but it turns out that there was no killing at all and so the movie's two heroes are merely bystanders, detached observers who oppose the hangings but don't really do anything to stop them.  The point may be that a lynching makes everyone complicit but this isn't exactly dramatized and, the unpleasantness behind them, the two cowpokes just ride out of town sadder, but not necessarily wiser.  There is a Black clergyman who administers a few prayers to the doomed men and, then, sings "Lonesome Valley" after the extra-judicial killings -- his presence is intended to alert the audience about the main stakes in the film, that is, the concealed subtext involving the slaughter of Black men throughout the country; the southern general, who turns out to not have fought in the War at all, is also a symbol of the White supremacy that made racist lynchings ubiquitous -- but this theme is addressed so ellliptically as to be essentially absent from the movie.  

The defect in the movie is that it is too liberal and optimistic in its view of human nature.  So far as I know, no one who participated in a lynching ever expressed any remorse or regret.  People will always find ways of justifying their bad actions -- this is how people are.  No doubt the lynch mob here would have consoled themselves, if anyone felt the need for consolation, by simply observing that anyone in their place, confronted with the same circumstantial evidence, would have acted in the same way.  No one admits fault.  The more grave the crime, the less likely is it that anyone will admit wrongdoing -- and this is particularly true where the crime is one that involves a mob of people.  Has anyone expressed any sincere regret over the mob attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021?  I don't think so.

The Oxbow Incident is handsomely shot.  Some of the locations involve the trails and gravel roads leading up to the so-called Whitney Portal (the trails heads leading to the top of Mount Whitney) in the Sierra Nevada mountains above Lone Pine. (This is where High Sierra was filmed).  However, much of the film looks theatrical, like a play recorded on celluloid and the half of the movie takes place in a convincing, if stylized, set on a soundstage, complete with an ominous hanging tree and a little stream trickling through the foreground.  It's strangely lit, somewhat expressionist, and the pervasive day-for-night and shadowy camerawork on the movie soundstage creates a suitably claustrophobic and strangled atmosphere.