CIMARRON

My 2020 quest to watch all the Oscar-Winning Best Pictures continues. The fourth film to be awarded the Oscar for Best Picture is Cimarron. This 1931 movie spans a forty-year period that commences on April 22, 1889, the day the great Oklahoma Land Rush on the Cherokee Strip began.

After Yancy Cravat (Richard Dix) is tricked out of the piece of land he wants, he and his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) and son leave the well-to-do trappings of Sabra’s family to set up a new life in the developing boomtown of Osage. Yancy establishes the local newspaper and becomes a well-respected leader in the town. The film seeks to set Yancy up as a man of high moral character amongst the lawlessness of the old West. He doesn’t speak poorly of Native Americans, he accepts a “colored” boy into his household, speaks heavily of the Christian bible, and defends a prostitute in court. The tale carries the Cravats through Oklahoma’s eventual statehood, the oil boom, and Sabra becoming the State’s first congresswoman in 1929, the very period of the film. Though well received when it debuted, this film has not aged well.

It is obvious that Dix’s career began in silent films. His over-expressive eyes and jerk mannerisms are in stark contrast to Dunne’s more subdued and natural presence. Though meant to be an upstanding and progressive thinker, Yancy comes off as a selfish and insufferable prick. He leaves Sabra for years at a time to go off and do as he pleases. He belittles just about everyone he speaks to and proselytizes at abandon. The movie is filled with racist comments and attitudes, both to Native Americans and African Americans, and is also anti-Semitic to a degree. Everyone in town shoots from the hip, literally, and are all expert marksmen. And, while the film takes its time over the initial 10 years, it rushes through the final 30 at such a pace that the Cravat tykes are suddenly teenagers and then married within a disorienting few minutes. And the conclusion with Yancy dying in Sabra’s arms after being missing for years couldn’t have been more forced. All the supporting characters are completely one-dimensional. There’s the dumb one, the stuck-up one, the stuttering one, the pretentious one… their names unimportant.

This film has the honor of being the first Western to win a Best Picture Oscar. Outside of that honor, it is really much more interesting as a character study into the mind frame of 1930s society than it is as an actual story. Many people consider this movie to be the least deserving of the Best Picture Oscar. I will give it some credit by saying that for me, that distinction still belongs to The Greatest Show on Earth. But it’s a close call.