The New Pictures

The Ox-Bow Incident (20th Century-Fox) is Walter Van Tilburg Clark's excellent sagebrush yarn filmed with tantalizing promise, a good deal of performance and some of lanky Henry Fonda's best acting.

This absorbing tale of a lynching opens one afternoon in the '80s, as two tired stubble-bearded cattle punchers (Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan) canter into the hushed, cruel, lonely street of a suncracked Nevada town. They enter a saloon In the whiskied twilight of the day, a native appears with news of an up-country rancher's murder. The whole ennui-soaked town comes to life with sinister vigor. A posse is illegally deputized by a lout who happens to be substituting for the official sheriff. The mob includes a blood-crazy pants-wearing woman; a smoldering ex-Confederate ramrod in uniform; his nervous, effeminate son; a bully who suspects the two strangers; a slobbering sadist caressing a rope; and two men who are desperately in opposition to the expedition--a colored handy man and a gentle elderly storekeeper.

In the late, cold night the galloping gang comes upon a camp of three sleeping men, binds and questions them. Their answers are unsatisfactory. Some of the posse, including the two cattle men, vote futilely against immediate hanging. One of the prisoners prays; another writes a letter; a third, trying to escape, is hobbled by a sharpshooter's bullet. With a borrowed knife he extracts the bullet from his leg. Then they are strung up from the backs of horses, with the brave, right-thinking Confederate major forcing his son to whip one of the animals out from under them. At.dawn, on the way back the lynching party meets the bona fide sheriff, who has proof that their victims were innocent. In a muted, finely directed closing scene, the two rangers ride away to deliver the letter written by the second of the doomed men to his wife.

The Ox-Bow Incident often suggests the perfect minor work it might have been. Its compact story naturally fits the screen, and it is squarely in Hollywood's open-air action tradition. So much of the picture is so good that its occasionally thoughtless details are magnified. Worst example: instead of using an ordinary tree for the lynching, the picture introduces a dramatized, super-real contraption drenched beyond recognition in Little Theater lighting.

China (Paramount) manages to make one of the most impressive races on earth seem like a corny subject. It stars recently drafted Alan Ladd and gazelle-eyed Loretta Young in as thick a glossary of cliches as may be collected currently from any U.S. screen. The film is ripe for the burlesque that the wandering team of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope might have given it.

The story concerns a handsome U.S. oil salesman, working the Far East for all it is worth, and a beautiful young American teacher, a hard-headed idealist in lipstick and raincoat. These two meet in the shell-screech and Kleiglight of Paramount's Chinese war. They help the Chinese, they love, and he dies. In depicting these events, several Paramount writers have had their characters speak out in such terms as: "Women just know things like that" (intuition); "It's the funniest feeling--I wish I could tell you what it's like" (love); "I am afraid. But it's a woman's fear" (fear); "He was a great guy" (death).

U.S. audiences lose time and pocket money by the booking of this bogus treatment of China into the nation's movie houses. The Chinese people lose more.

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