Why the Ox-Bow Incident is Deep on So Many Levels

One of the first movies I remember seeing as a kid had an eerie almost film-noir aesthetic, yet it was a Western: 1943’s The Ox-Bow Incident. What stuck out in my mind was the bravery and vocal honesty of Henry Fonda, the desperate pleading of a very handsome and obviously innocent Dana Andrews (who I first developed a crush on in 1944’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which I saw first), and the otherworldly almost prophetic presence of Leigh Whipper, the Black actor who played Sparks, the preacher and voice of reason to the vengeful mob.

As many know, the film, directed by William Weldmann, is about corruption and the murderous power of a mob that throws law and order to the side in pursuit of revenge and vigilantism. Henry Fonda, who plays Gil Carter, and Harry Morgan (who many remember from his later days on the hit TV series MASH), who plays Art Croft, are two drifters passing through a small subdued town when a beloved rancher is robbed and murdered. With very little information, a mob, led by Marc Lawrence as the plotting Farnley , and Frank Conroy as the amoral Major Tetley, is quickly formed. Soon any voices of reason are not only drowned out by the mob, but also threatened for possibly being in cahoots with the sought after murderers.

The timing of the production is no coincidence, when American audiences saw the film in the early 1940s it was during the progress of World War II, and the implication was obvious that Hitler's evils in Europe could also inhabit the ethos of the sacred American/western frontier. It was a call to action against tyranny everywhere and for America not to turn a blind eye toward the atrocities happening in Germany as well as early rumblings of paranoid concerns around Communism right here at home.

To that latter point, many also view this timeless classic as a condemnation of McCarthyism, although not even a turn of phrase until almost 10 years later, many of the actors and producers of The Ox-Bow Incident were in fact asked to testify and name names of any colleagues thought to belong to the Communist Party.

But I have to say the scenes with Leigh Whipper as Sparks are often the most haunting; it wasn’t very often at that period of time that a Black man was portrayed as the sage voice of reason. Leigh’s story is a fascinating one: Born in South Carolina in 1876, at the end of the Reconstruction Era in which his parents had participated, he was educated in D.C., attended Howard University, before turning permanently to a life in the theater. At a time when work for black actors was limited, Whipper became a successful actor, appearing in more than twenty plays and a greater number of films. He not only joined Actors Equity in 1913 (the first Black actor to do so) and other organizations where African-Americans were few in number, but he also helped fellow African-American thespians by founding the Negro Actors Guild in 1937.

Many people thought Whipper was a white actor playing in blackface because of his keen features, due in part to some Native American heritage.  Already in his 60s during the shooting of Ox-Bow, he was honored a year later by the Ethiopian government for his portrayal of the superior Emperor Haile Selassie in the movie Mission to Moscow (1943), in which he delivers a speech before the League of the Nations.

He appeared in almost two dozen films, but I’ll always remember him singing a gospel hymn in an almost comedic yet stark rhythm once the mob hung the three innocent men, the lyrics are equally as haunting, “You got to go before your Maker, you got to go there by yourself. Nobody here can go there for you, you got to go here by yourself.” Check out Leigh, Dana, Anthony, Henry and Art in this timeless and very TIMELY classic, The Ox-Bow Incident. And while you do, think of the current political mobs who bully and accuse people who think differently as “un-American” or “Communist”….for me, I see a real life Major Tetley in Donald Trump, bull-horning his mob of Tea Party-ers, hankering for a lynching party of our President.