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Jul 07, 2016 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

In 1885, a pair of cowboys named Gil and Art blow into a dusty Nevada town where a local rancher has been murdered by cattle rustlers. Wary of being accused of the crime themselves, they join up with a posse of locals bent on revenge. In the mountains, they capture three men who protest their innocence, despite several pieces of circumstantial evidence that mark them as the culprits. As the posse quickly transforms into a lynch mob, Gil and Art find themselves at a moral crossroads.

A passion project for director William A. Wellman, The Ox-Bow Incident was shot on a shoe-string budget and released in 1943 to rave reviews and poor box office returns. Neither of these outcomes seem surprising in retrospect. Two years into a world war that had yet to swing in their favor and only one year after rounding up tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans and placing them in internment camps, it’s unlikely that the American public were in the mood for a blisteringly bitter, morally murky cautionary tale about the folly of revenge and mob justice. Clocking in at a brisk seventy-five minutes, The Ox-Bow Incident is a marvel of narrative economy and deft casting. The only actor likely to be familiar to modern audiences is Henry Fonda, who stars as Gil Carter. At first glance, Carter seems very much in line with Tom Joad, Juror Number Eight and the various other characters that would define Fonda’s onscreen persona; a decent, sensible man who goes against the grain in order to do what’s right. This casting choice turns out to be an excellent tonal misdirect, as Carter quickly reveals himself to be a bitter, cynical alcoholic who only joins the posse to avoid being accused of the crime himself. Even as he begins to suspect that the accused men are innocent, he makes only token efforts to defend them, knowing that the will of the mob is all but inevitable.

Although Fonda is excellent as the ostensible lead, The Ox-Bow Incident boasts a (somewhat literal) murderer’s row of character actors in its supporting cast. Despite having only an hour and fifteen minutes to tell its story, the script and the actors work in near perfect harmony to create a range of memorable characters with only moments of screen time. There’s Harry Davenport as the sympathetic and good-hearted shop keeper. Paul Hurst as the cruel town drunk who only agrees to come along if he can string up the suspects himself. Dana Andrews as the leader of the accused men who, despite mounting piles of evidence against him, keeps the audience on his side by sheer force of the decency inherent in his eyes and voice. Perhaps best of all is Frank Conroy as Major Tetley, a former Confederate major who initially presents himself as a figure of leadership and reason among the posse before slowly revealing himself as a sadistic, bloodthirsty authoritarian and the film’s true villain. The only misstep - and it’s more a fault of the script than the actor - is Mary Beth Hughes as Gil’s brassy saloon maid of an ex-girlfriend, who feels out of place enough to suggest that the producers felt it needed a woman for the sake of advertising. Even the movie itself seems to know she doesn’t belong, dispensing with her after one scene.

Kino Lorber’s new 4K release of The Ox-Bow Incident further improves upon a 2002 restoration and beautifully highlights the films’ noir-like cinematography and crackling, overlapping dialogue. The bonus features include a brief piece on the 2002 restoration from the original negative, as well as a short but comprehensive biography of Henry Fonda which originally aired on A&E in 1997. Also present is a commentary track featuring America West historian Dick Eulain and William Wellman Jr., the son of the director. A must for the any cinephile’s collection, The Ox-Bow Incident is a bleak, hard-hitting film that seems just as relevant now as it did seventy years ago.