from the diary: “Friday 1/10/86
“Read The Ox-Bow Incident. Books don’t affect me the same way as movies. If I’d watched the hangings in a movie the thing would still be haunting me. As it is I’m reading Black Sunday and Ox-Bow is fading.”
It disturbed me at the time but, consonant with what I said then, I barely remember The Ox-Bow Incident. Wasn’t it about a lynching?
On the other hand the visual of the two teen brothers hanged for rustling in the Clint Eastwood starrer Hang ‘Em High throws itself up on my mental movie screen every so often and does not fail to disturb. That at the beginning of the movie Eastwood himself is lowered from a tree where he has been strangling after a botched hanging adds something (brotherly? fatherly? erotic?) to Eastwood’s watching the execution. He’d argued for their lives.
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