Cimarron

Believe it or not, until 1990, Cimarron was the only western to ever win the Best Picture Academy Award. It would take sixty years for another film, Dances With Wolves, to join it on that stage despite just how immensely popular westerns were through the three decades spanning the 50s through the 70s. 1931’s Cimarron was just the fourth film to win the top prize at the recently established Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, though, like many of the other pictures in this era that won, it has largely gone forgotten by general audiences with the exception of those of us who seek such films out. 

And that’s a bit of a shame since it is one of the few films on this list that have fallen into the public domain and are readily accessible. As of this writing, it is available for free in total in a gorgeous 4K restoration on YouTube as well as several physical media formats. The film is out there, there are just not that many people seeking it out anymore. 

But that isn’t a new phenomenon for this film. It wasn’t really a hit when it initially released, either. It was a critical darling but was so expensive to produce during the heart of the Depression that it failed to earn back that cost. Watching it now, nearly a hundred years later, it’s surprising it got such a lukewarm response from audiences. There is a great deal of spectacle on display, especially in the early scenes showing the Oklahoma land rush in 1889. The camera and stunt work on screen are first rate for a film of this era and are still impressive to modern eyes. During the 70th Academy Awards when a clip reel showcasing all the previous Best Picture winners was shown, this land rush sequence was the clip used for Cimarron. 

The film, based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Edna Ferber, follows Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) and his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) from the land rush in 1889 through to the oil boom in the 1900s, showing not only the changes that happened over the years in Oklahoma but also the changes in their relationship as they each grew older, raised children, and experienced changes in attitudes and beliefs. When we first meet Yancey, he is preparing for a prime piece of land that he ultimately loses when a young prostitute, Dixie Lee (Estelle Taylor), tricks him and stakes her claim there first. Instead, Yancey ends up settling into the small boomtown of Osage, where he sets up a local newspaper.

But Yancey is restless. After he helps gun down a gang of outlaws, including their leader “The Kid”, someone he was an acquaintance of, he uses this as a reason to chase another land rush, the Cherokee Strip. This, along with the Spanish-American War, keeps Yancey away from his wife and children for five years. When he does return, it is to defend Dixie Lee in court over an accusation of being a public nuisance. Yancey stays for a while, seeing Oklahoma become a state and Osage grow exponentially. His son, now grown, elects to marry a Native American woman, against his mother’s approval. Yancey, on the other hand, sees it as his son’s choice, and there is no use trying to stand in between the two lovers. 

Going into this film, there was one thing I was really aware of: some of the views and representations of minorities were going to be dated. I had seen this film before back in the late 1990s, but my recollection of the film was spotty at best. For all intents and purposes, this was like a first-time viewing for me. While I knew about the reputation, I was still not prepared for the character of Isaiah (Eugene Jackson), a young Black kid in the employ of the Cravats. An early shot of him has him hanging out from a ceiling fixture, waving a fan over the white folks sitting around a table below. Eugene plays him in with a very stereotypical Black accent, overly wide-eyed and exaggerated. One can argue that it was a product of the times, and I won’t dispute that. But later in the film, he is shot in the back, and the camera lingers on his collapse. Yancey walks right past his body, not even noticing it until someone picks Isaiah up and brings him inside. Even then, the greater focus is on Yancey’s trivial flesh wound over Isaiah being killed. 

The Native Americans aren’t treated much better. At the prayer meetings, they are seated separately from the white folk. The donation tray bypasses them, assuming, perhaps accurately, that they wouldn’t have anything to put in anyway. Yancey plays this off lightly but the undertone of prejudice is there, nevertheless. Sabra hires a young Native girl as a housekeeper, and we later learn that girl is royalty amongst the natives. While this alone says something about the differences in how the natives see their royalty and how the whites see them, this is further hammered in by how Sabra reacts when she learns that her son wants to marry the girl she thinks of as nothing more than her hired servant. While this attitude softens over the years, it is hard to watch one of the film’s protagonists reacting this way. 

As I mentioned before, though, this is not only a product of its time but also represents the attitudes of the people in the time period that this film is set. When viewed with that in mind, it is easier to get past such things and look at the film on a broader scale. Unfortunately, this film struggles in a lot of other areas, too. For one, it suffers from what a lot of films in this era suffered from: not quite knowing how to write for a talking picture. This means that there are segments where the script has to rely on on-screen text to communicate the passage of time or events key to understanding the changes happening between certain scenes. Later films would find ways to communicate that naturally into the plot, but this film, among many others from this era, has to rely on that text to marry some scenes together. 

It also features a protagonist that, while outwardly portraying a sense of nobility, is actually selfish in his actions, leaving behind his family for his own pursuits. We are disposed to like him because he is good-natured and has several scenes where he risks his life to save others. But he also takes little thought about his wife and young children and leaves them for years at a time, only coming back for reasons besides his family. It’s a strange mixture of character traits that makes it difficult to know how to feel about him. 

Likewise, Sabra has traits that make us want to turn on her, too. She becomes the first woman in Oklahoma elected to Congress and, despite her earlier prejudices against the Native Americans, comes to accept them and even laud the virtues of her daughter-in-law. But she is also one of the driving forces behind the prosecution of Dixie Lee. In some ways, this makes for a more interesting character, but it also makes us unsure of how we are supposed to feel about her. 

The film covers a lot of years and ends on a note of tragedy. The problem is, there is little emotional attachment to either Yancey or Sabra, making the ending fall flat. There is little emotional investment in their relationship by this point, and the film has gone on for far too long so that when we do finally get to the end, the only feeling we are getting is relief that it is ending. Irene Dunne would go on to be a major player in Hollywood and that charisma is on display here, but her character has moments that threaten to turn us on her, though she is eventually redeemed in our eyes.

There is no doubt in my mind that the primary reason Cimarron won Best Picture in 1931 was because of the impressive, Oscar winning, production values on display. Nearly everywhere, it is shocking just how much work is on display to not only build up the boom town of Osage but convincingly portray it from several different levels of growth.  For a film in Depression-era America, this is impressive enough to sway voters to lay their bets on it over the likes of East Lynne, The Front Page, Skippy, and especially Trader Horn. Given the choice amongst those five films, I would have voted for Cimarron, too. By pure spectacle alone, it is the clear winner. But that doesn’t mean I feel it is a great film. It runs far too long, and it lacks any real emotional depth. Still, it is a fascinating picture to revisit occasionally, just to see what could be done back in the day when almost everyone else was struggling in the face of economic depression.

Academy Award Nominations:

Outstanding Production: William LeBaron (won)

Best Director: Wesley Ruggles

Best Actor: Richard Dix

Best Actress: Irene Dunne

Best Writing, Adaptation: Howard Estabrook (won)

Best Art Direction: Max Rée (won)

Best Cinematography: Edward Cronjager

____________________________________________________

Release Date: February 9, 1931

Running Time: 124 minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Richard Dix and Irene Dunne

Directed by: Wesley Ruggles