THE CINEMA
" Strange Incident." Generally released.---“ Undercover." At the London Pavilion.
IF it had not been for the vigilance of that distinguished critic, Miss Dilys Powell, I for one should have remained unaware that a remark- able film called The Oxbow Incident, long awaited from America, had indeed both been and gone. The curious fate of the film in this country is as fruitful of speculation as a piece of secret diplo- macy, but here we will be content with the facts. The film, its title changed to Strange Incident, was slipped into the cinemas as a second feature without benefit of Press show or normal publicity, but fortunately may still be caught by the painstaking cinemagoer. Strange Incident is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. It is the very simple story of a lynching purporting to occur in the south-western United States during the last century. The viciousness of the crime is intensified by the fact that the lynching is carried out for the most part by ordinary honest citizens turned into' a lawless mob by force of circumstances. The film is very much concerned with the nature of those circumstances and soberly attempts (with only ^ very little pretension, irrelevance and sentimental improbability) to study the origin and nature of mob violence. Some of the lynchers partici- pate because they are sadists craving the excitement of a hanging, some out of revenge, some to demonstrate that they are not cowards afraid of violence, others because they do not wish. to be suspected of sympathy with the wrongdoing of which the victims are (wrongly) Ic believed to be guilty. The film begins and ends on the night of the
lynching, but during the hours of pursuit, trial and execution the
mood of the mob darkens and lightens like a thundery sky. As one a watches, the feeling of personal participation is often a. strong as if one were there in the darkness of the cold mountain camp being a swayed by the same primitive forces which wrestle with the fate of the three bewildered victims. In this power to involve the audience we may perhaps have a clue to the diffidence with which Strange Incident is being presented to the public (it cannot surely be due to any anxiety about the feelings of our American allies, for it deals with mob violence of .many years ago). I find myself imagining a point of view of this kind—" we can't expect people these days to get so worked up about whether three men ought to have been hanged or not. Nowadays so many people get killed. And all that
about justice and a fair trial first. . . . Well, put it on with Hello, Beautiful and hope for the best" And so they did.
In war-time there is inevitably a tendency for life to be held cheaper than in those periods when it is less freely expended. All the more need therefore for the film-maker to remind us from time to time that every battlefield corpse represents an individual life brought summarily to its end. The current issue of Movietone News finds time to refer to the bodies of Italians littering their Sicilian fields. These men, we are told, gave their lives for an unjust, an unworthy cause. To say so little is perhaps to over- simplify ; but at any rate it is better to do so than to follbw the commoner practice of ignoring completely the solemn fact of individual disaster and the ultimate and irreparable personal sacrifices which war demands. When we see reason struggling with blind passion in the homely faces of the citizens of Strange Incident we are watching a spectacle which will grow more signifi- cant as the war's end approaches, and one which we dare not ignore. That the sacrifice of individual lives for a common cause still remains an inescapable condition of victory is adequately demonstrated by Undercover, a conventional story of guerilla activity in Yugoslavia. It is a pity, however, that in this film the moral codes represented are either pitch black in hue or as immaculate as the driven snow. Strange Incident might well have been distributed alongside this film as a reminder that in real life it is the intermediate moral shades of grey that present us with our most serious problems.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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