“A man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin’ everybody in the world, ’cause then he’s just not breaking one law but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody’s conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived?”

From the Oxbow Incident (1943).

The Oxbow Incident was based on a 1940 Western by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and starred Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, among others. It tells the story of a posse that goes after suspected cattle rustlers in the Oxbow Valley in Nevada in 1885. The rustlers are also presumed to have killed a popular rancher. When the posse happens on three suspicious-looking men, it ignores its own qualms and the protests of the local judge and proceeds to hang them. On going back home, the vigilantes are overwhelmed with guilt to find the rancher alive.

A 75 minute classic that was one of Orson Welles’ favorites and the only Western he considered making, the film won an Academy Award in 1998 but performed poorly at the box-office. Although it was intended as a defense of war-time American values, audiences disliked the implicit connection it drew between Nazi mob rule and the Old West. It seemed to say that America might not be immune in the future to eruptions of cowboy justice and that even people who are mostly law-abiding in their daily lives can commit murder, while convincing themselves they’ve had a “reasonable accusation, fair trial, and just execution.”