4 articles from 2009
Western Wednesdays: ‘The Ox-Bow Incident’
16 December 2009 3:31 PM, PST
| The Flickcast
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Today’s Wednesday Western comes to you courtesy of a namedrop by the big man himself, Clint Eastwood. If Eastwood casually says The Ox-Bow Incident is a really good Western, you have to drop what you’re doing and watch it. (Considering it’s only one hour long, it’s pretty easy to find some time to do it!)
I can see why Eastwood likes Ox-Bow. There are shades of Hang ‘Em High and Unforgiven in it. It’s the kind of film that reminds me why I was so eager to explore this genre. We all tend to classify Westerns as rousing shoot-em-ups and masculine swagger, but there are a lot of dark, bitter stories hidden among the John Ford panoramas. Even this film is often billed as a Henry Fonda movie about cattle rustlers, giving the impression that it’ll be a classic horse opera. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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- Elisabeth Rappe
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Western Wednesdays: ‘Mad Dog Morgan’
9 December 2009 1:15 PM, PST
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This is only the second installment of Western Wednesday, and I believe I have already seen the messiest and strangest film that ever boasted a horse, a pistol, and a sunset: Mad Dog Morgan. It was a toss-up between Morgan and The Ox-Bow Incident, but I had a thirst for some Ozploitation, and Morgan is a pretty legendary piece of Australian filmmaking.
It also seemed like a good idea to expand the cinematic frontier early on in this feature, and visit a place that has a remarkably similar history. Americans tend to think that the myth of the Wild Wild West is theirs, and theirs alone – and it certainly is, but Australia enjoyed a settlement experience that was just as violent and lawless as our own. They just had kangaroos instead of buffalo, and convicts instead of hardy pioneers.
One thing America and Australia would appear to have in common is an idolization of outlaws.
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- Elisabeth Rappe
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Old Ass Movies: Go West With ‘The Ox-Bow Incident’
28 June 2009 9:45 AM, PDT
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Every week, Film School Rejects presents a film that was made before you were born and tells you why you should like it. This week, Old Ass Movies presents:
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
The Ox-Bow Incident is the story of a lynching that went right, but in the wrong way. Simple as an old man's morality tale and painfully to the point, it covers a timeless debate concerning law, justice and the misconceptions they suffer in our hands and minds. William Wellman and Lamar Trotti's film is frighteningly relevant and downright haunting at first sight.
Two regular cowboys, Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) and Art Croft (Harry Morgan) enter a shabby town somewhere in the wild west. Looking for a certain girl, whiskey and any kind of action they go to the only saloon around where they run into a couple of local ranchers and a general bad mood over the cattle-rustling raids that's been plaguing the business
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- Loukas Tsouknidas
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Pre-Code Wellman and Godard's Code Unknown
31 March 2009 7:17 AM, PDT
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William "Wild Bill" Wellman was always more renowned for his reportedly rough and tumble extra-cinematic resume (delinquent, pilot, stuntman) than for his mostly orthodox films -- from his nearly 40-year career, only a handful of astute genre epics remain lodged in the cultural front-brain today: "Nothing Sacred" and "A Star Is Born" (both 1937), "Beau Geste" (1939), and "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943). They're all beautifully judged, visually eloquent and delicately acted films (compare Fredric March in "A Star Is Born" to the rest of his mannered '30s work, and you get a taste of Wellman's touch), particularly "Ox-Bow," wherein Dana Andrews and Henry Fonda are unnervingly in touch with the wages of frontier violence.
Still, Wellman worked long enough in the studio system to assure a certain homogeneity to most of his work, and so the payload of early Wellmans delivered in Warner/TCM's new Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume Three have as
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- Michael Atkinson
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