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**** “The Ox-Bow Incident.”

Key. $19.98.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s classic study of mob violence and the tortures of conscience is translated here as a grim, gray, stylized Western morality play--with Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan as cowpokes caught up in a lynch mob, a mixed band driven by its leaders to extract blood vengeance from three possibly innocent strangers (Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn and Francis Ford). Director William Wellman is often criticized for having shot much of “Ox-Bow” on studio sets, rather than locations. But this doesn’t crucially hurt the film; the claustrophobic unreality may actually add to the nightmarish tension. Unrelenting, extremely powerful, this is possibly Wellman’s best film.