In the movies, you can pretty much count on Henry Fonda always to do the right thing. This is the man, after all, who played Abraham Lincoln, Wyatt Earp, Admiral Nimitz, General MacArthur, and Clarence Darrow. Sure, he also played the menacing Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, but every actor needs to stretch once in a while. Some of Fonda’s characters, like those above, were unqualified heroes. Others, like his Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath and Gil Carter in The Ox-Bow Incident are more morally conflicted, yet still emerge from their particular predicaments without having condemned their souls to Hell.

The Ox-Bow Incident puts Fonda’s character at the center of an episode of Western mob violence that is the result of emotions running high and reason taking a vacation. Adapted from Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s popular 1940 novel, the film was written by Lamar Trotti, the screenwriter of some of John Ford’s more picaresque and light-hearted films, and directed by William Wellman, the director of some of the best films of Hollywood’s Golden Era. Unfortunately, the material does not play to either of their strengths, resulting in the kind of earnest, overly didactic film in which Fox specialized in churning out during the time during and directly after the second World War. As an exploration of the motivations of mob violence, it is certainly a much darker Western than audiences weaned on Tom Mix and Zane Grey were used to at the time, but the filmmakers seem not to know quite how to get their ideas across without having each of the many characters deliver sermons on what is right or wrong about hanging a man without sufficient evidence. These themes would be delved into with much more subtlety and sophistication a decade later in John Sturges’ superior Bad Day at Black Rock, although that film deals with the emotional and social aftereffects of mob violence (perhaps the more interesting approach) than with the events and struggles leading up to it.

It is not just the approach to the themes that dates the film, however. Wellman’s characteristically brisk seat-of-the-pants direction, normally a great asset to a film like The Public Enemy, works against him in this film with several scenes with approximately thirty people in the frame at any given time. Crowd scenes, it appears, were not Wellman’s strength. They are recklessly filmed with almost complete disregard for the coherence and continuity of on-screen space and eyeline matches. These scenes are also almost unbearably talky. Were it not for the horses, the script as filmed could easily be performed on the stage as a three-act play. Filmed almost exclusively on soundstages on a low budget, the film is hamstrung by its stage-bound direction. It is worth watching, though, even just for the sight of the sturdy Jane Darwell on a horse who, in her hat and dungarees, could effortlessly pass for Eugene Pallette.

Excerpt of Matt Baily's review on "Not Coming to a Theatre Near You" located HERE