Depressing as all get out but wonderfully written and acted.

A solid western with a clear message.

A chilling tale of mob rule and miscarriage of justice. Wellman directs with a minimum of fuss, relying mainly on a fine -- often brilliant -- sense of composition. The ensemble cast leaves little room for complaint. Fonda and Morgan serve as surrogates for the audience, mostly observing, wanting to interfere but unable to. Andrews also stands out, he fits in beautifully in this noir-ish story. The one major misstep is a romantic subplot that seems to serve little narrative or symbolic purpose.

Heavy-handed but effective, like an early precursor to Paths of Glory (if without that film's brilliance). Fonda is fitting as the audience identification character, eminently reasonable and likable as usual. A rather powerful anti-vigilante film. What the fuck was with that love story, though?

I graduated from law school, and so I thought my days of receiving preachy lectures on the importance of the rule of law were over. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I can never seem to extract much wisdom or enjoyment from these simplistic and heavy-handed morality tales, no matter how well-paced and well-meaning.

The most powerful and disturbing Western to ever come out of Hollywood.

969

A movie like this is so simple and minimal, but yet capable of so much. For some reason, it felt heavily edited or unfinished even (the aforementioned love story, the mexican's character, the soldier's son, the short length) but what is presented is presented in a way that affected me very strongly. Nobody makes westerns like this, they never did, and they probably won't again. Anthony Quinn was outstanding.

Predictable, maybe, but pithy. Mob justice goes wrong, as mob justice so often does.

A Western of unusual sensitivity. Ostensibly simple and blunt, but delicate and nuanced to the keen eye, and so very powerful. It slightly preempts a later Henry Fonda film, 12 Angry Men, but only slightly, and this one is more somber.

A near perfect look at the importance of laws in society and the dangers of mob mentality. The movie's only flaws are an undeveloped love story that doesn't fully fit with the rest of the film, and that it's a little short.

For a large part set across a gorgeously haunting Gothic backdrop with the hollow noise of a grotesque mob dying away into the mist, The Ox-Bow Incident really is outstanding aesthetically, paced to a pitch of brooding dread and despair. But as happens so often with films about justice, its quite beautiful subtleties are overshadowed by familiarly empty, manipulative moralising which at its most sensible boils down to "think before you act", at its worst a load of romantic rubbish.

Terrific. A movie with the exact opposite attitude of most other Westerns

Good acting, average plot.

Brilliant. The love story was pointless but it truly is a heartbreaking film. I felt guilty afterwards. It was really touching. Definitely worth a look.