the gutter channels on the front free and rear free endpapers are deeply stained (probably from the binding glue used to adhere them to the inside front and rear boards as it also trace the edges of the pastedown in a perfect shape of the boards. The boards are bound in a wheatstraw cloth, the topstain iand foredges are clean,as is the book internally, and the spine titles are bright.

This is a stated first printing of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, published by Random House in 1940. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, remains a classic of its time, and one of the definitive American movies about the dangers of mob justice.Hardcover. No man, in other words, has the right to play God. It's a brief, but telling element of a beautifully composed monologue that expands upon the movie's central thesis: that any man, no matter how just and upright he fancies himself to be, has the right to take the law into his own hands. Fonda, throughout his career, was often called upon to communicate such sentiments. It's everything people ever have found out about justice and what's right and wrong.' So goes a quote that Fonda's character relays in the film. 'Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. On the contrary, it only begets more bloodshed, more trauma, and more loss. It is a film that understands there is not necessarily any catharsis in reprisal.

There is only the cruel inevitability of man's demise, and the crushing feeling of inescapable culpability. There are no easily identifiable good guys and bad guys here, no daring escape missions where the heroes vanquish their foes and get the girl before the credits roll. Like Howard Hawks’ Red River, another classic western that feels bracingly contemporary today, is ultimately a study of man’s ugliest impulses. They try to reason with their attackers, they defend themselves, and they make pleas for their lives - all in vain, though Wellman’s film does end on a note that is curiously upbeat, given how fatalistic this thing is on the whole. Characters who we have been repeatedly told are villainous and hateful are revealed to be, in what we figure might be their last moments on earth, desperately, even pathetically human. Take yourself out of the period trappings of this sequence, and it is as ugly and difficult to watch as any home-invasion set piece. One of the movie’s most stark and unsettling passages occurs when three weary travelers (that our central posse suspect of the initial killing) are awoken at gunpoint with a murderous ultimatum. With a painterly attention to framing and composition, The Ox-Bow Incident slowly, methodically continues to tighten the noose around the viewer's neck, until we find ourselves gasping for breath in the midst of a complete moral cesspool. Once the mob heads out in pursuit of the killer, Wellman’s film becomes a great deal more tense.

The ox bow incident book