Thursday, November 23, 2006
MOB RULE
Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was William Wellman's
with Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan along with Dana Andrews and a gorgeous Anthony Quinn. Incredible. In his 20's.
I digress. This is a serious film.
It is about the lynching (wrongfully) of three men who are in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong posse.
The point is not so much the fact that mob rule rules but that there are all kinds of equivocation that support it.
The screenplay is almost allegorical in that respect. There is the coward, the drunk, the military nut hiding his own shit, there is the honest storekeeper who tries to work with the other side and so on.
Nothing stops the inevitable.
Fonda plays a guy who has no responsibility in life at all. He and his partner Morgan have no role in this town or in the lynching. Their intervention is, in a way, too late. But they do the one thing men can do in the face of injustice that has been done.
Restitution.
This all sounds ponderous and treatise-like but it does not come off that way.
The film is a short, tight, dramatic thriller that has a moral to tell and it manages to do both jobs very well.
I will give it a 5 out of Netflix5.
