By some miracle, I had never encountered William A. Wellman’s pivotal 1943 Western The Ox-Bow Incident, until someone screened it at a video party recently (it’s available at Boîte Noire).

It’s not exactly party material, but this is one of the best Westerns I’ve ever seen. And the film’s prescience, coming in such close proximity to the end of WWII and the beginnings of McCarthyite witch hunts, is undeniably staggering. The story is very simple, but there is nothing simple in its telling: a mob in the Wild West decide to take the law into their own hands when they fear a local man has been murdered. Mob mentality never looked so gruesome. Harry Morgan (later of M*A*S*H) and Henry Fonda star, the latter playing a voice of reason that isn’t heard. The suspense builds horrifically in this marvelous, taut little film, each one of its 75 minutes worse than the last.

Now out on DVD is Tokyo Decadence, Ryu Murakami’s weird and kinky Japanese entry about a high-end call girl who finds one of her naughty clients pushing the boundaries of their S/M encounters way too far into the abusive zone. I enjoyed this film when I first saw it, though a lot of it now strikes me as a comedy of the absurd. The twisted will appreciate. :

» Matthew Hays