The Ox-Bow Incident
The Ox-Bow Incident is a
1940 western novel by
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, in which two drifters are drawn into a posse formed to find the murderer of a local man.
The novel was adapted as a movie in
1943 directed by
William A. Wellman and starring
Henry Fonda,
Dana Andrews,
Mary Beth Hughes,
Anthony Quinn,
William Eythe,
Harry Morgan and
Jane Darwell. It was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Picture. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the
United States National Film Registry.
In the book and the film, a posse is formed and
lynches three
cattle rustlers against the protests of the local judge; the rustlers are then found to have been innocent. The novel and the movie thus criticize
mob rule in favour of the proper workings of justice, even if it is slow-moving. As such, it is partly intended as a wartime defense of
American values versus the Nazi Germany. However, by associating
Nazi mob rule with the values of the
Old West, it implies that Americans have the potential to succumb to mob rule too. Although this moral appealed to the critics, the film did poorly at the box office in part because moviegoers were dismayed by the downbeat ending and all it implied.
Producer Darryl Zanuck reportedly wanted his name on the film but knew it would fail at the box office, so he made it on a very small budget.
