The Oxbow Incident & Vigilantism

This excellent black and white movie based on the book of the same name by Walter van Tilburg Clark, was released in 1943, but it is just as relevant today, as in the past, because how justice is administered is always relevant. It received an Oscar nomination for best picture. The film starred Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Harry Morgan (later of "Dragnet" and "MASH" fame) and Anthony Quinn, with a couple of other well known faces in supporting roles: Jane Darwell (of "The Grapes of Wrath" fame) and Harry Davenport (of "Gone With The Wind" fame), along with some others. As was not uncommon in those times, the film was a relatively short 75 minutes in length.

If you've never seen this movie, be aware that this contains the basic story, ending and all. The crux of the story, set some 20 years after the Civil War, is about a group people from a small western town, who take out after the men they believe murdered one of the nearby ranchers to steal his cattle. Even before leaving town the calls for revenge and hanging fill the air, as reason and legal rights take a back seat to emotion and ego. When the posse captures three men, they indeed have the rancher's cattle, but the head of the group (played by Dana Andrews) tells the posse he bought the cattle, but did not get a bill of sale. This becomes the main evidence against the men, who are told the rancher was murdered. The man tells the posse they did not kill the rancher, but by this time a former Confederate army major, dressed in his old uniform, pushes for hanging the men, which goes against the order of the judge who authorized the posse. So we have a spit and polish military man who doesn't want to follow orders of a superior in an attempt to relive his past. The brooding Major had forced his adult son to come along with the posse in order to instill some "masculinity" into his sensitive son, who shows no inclination to be anything like his father (sometimes the apple falls further from the tree than the saying implies, or does it?). The Major's fear of weakness shows, when the head of the captured men whimpers a bit, and the Major tells him "you're taking it like a woman." One man (played by Harry Davenport) wholeheartedly opposes the vigilante justice being pushed by the Major, but he finds it difficult to rein in the escalating calls for the executions, although the Major's son joins him in opposing his father, as do a couple of others. One of the captured men is a Mexican (played by Anthony Quinn), which adds an element of racism and bigotry to the emotional mob, as they call him, "the Mex." The last of the three is an old man not completely in possession of his faculties, played by Francis Ford.* The three men are trapped in a nightmarish drama as the posse decides their fate, complete with one of the posse who likes to carry one of the nooses and hold it up and then make the distorted face of a man being strangled to death. Such is the further torture of the desperate men.

Instead of taking the men back to town to await the sheriff, who was at the rancher's home, the angry group, stirred by the Major and a couple of others, votes to hang the men, with only a few having the courage to oppose the action. The Major gives the head man time to write a letter to his wife and two children, which he then gives to the man who had tried so hard to save their lives, so that he can get it to the man's family. This man reads the letter and tries to get the Major to read it too, but to no avail. The Major tries to force his son to chase the horse out from under one of the doomed men, but the son can't do it. The men are hanged and then shot to make sure they are dead. The shots bring the now nearby sheriff and a deputy galloping up. The posse tells the sheriff how they got the killers and hanged them. The sheriff then tells them that the rancher is not dead and that he has the men who wounded the rancher. The sheriff hears that only seven men opposed the hangings, which brings him to say, "God better have mercy on you; you won't get any from me."

The posse returns to town and the Major heads home, followed a bit distantly by his son. The Major enters the house, but then locks the door so his son can't follow. When the son tries the door but can't get in, he yells into his father, calling him a "depraved, murderous beast," and adding, "You can't feel pity, you can't even feel guilt. You knew those men were innocent, but you were cold crazy to see them hanged and to make me watch it.... How does it feel to have begot a weakling Major? Does it make you fearful there may be some weakness in you too that other men may discover and whisper about?" The Major goes into another room and shoots himself.

The other members of the posse go to the saloon, where one of the seven who opposed the hangings (played by Henry Fonda) reads the hanged man's letter to all present. The letter mentions the man who tried to help them so much, and that, "I suppose there are some other good men here too, only they don't seem to realize what they're doing... Man just can't naturally take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurting everybody in the world... 'cause then he's not just breakin' one law, but all laws.... (Law) is everything  people have ever found out about justice... it's the very conscience of humanity ... There can't be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience?"

* Francis Ford was the brother of famous movie director, John Ford.

This photo is from the DVD released in 2003 by 20th Century Fox.

WORD HISTORY:
Vigil-This word, the source of the word, "vigilante," goes back to Indo European "weg," which had the notion of "be active."^ This gave its Latin offspring "vigil," which meant "alert, watching, awake," and which produced Latin "vigilia," meaning "a watch (noun, but not the time piece)." This was passed on to Latin-based Old French as "vigile," with the meaning "watch (in the sense "stand guard")," but it also came to be used in the religious sense as "evening before a holy day." English borrowed the word from the French carried to England by the Normans, but not until the 1200s, and with the religious meaning, which has since broadened beyond religion to mean "observance of a cause, or in observance of a departed one," often with the use of lighted candles. 

^ "Vigil" is related to "vigor," a Latin-derived word borrowed by English from French, and distantly to "velocity," a word borrowed from Latin, and it is also distantly related to "waken," "wake" (verb) and "watch" (both noun and verb), all from the Germanic roots of English.