Cimarron is a western epic that spans four decades, building on not only our main characters but the nation that surrounds them. Cimarron is the first western to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and the statue won't go to another western for nearly sixty years until Dances With Wolves. It is also the first and only Best Picture winner given to RKO Pictures. The film was directed by Wesley Ruggles in 1931 and is based on the book of the same name written by Edna Ferber a year prior. It stars Richard Dix as Yancey Cravat and Irene Dunn as Sabra Cavat.
The film opens with an extraordinary scene of thousands of horses and wagons racing off to claim new land in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush, with Yancey and his family among them. To film this sequence,
five-thousand extras and twenty-eight cameramen were used. We watch as Yancey, an editor, settles down in a small shanty town and creates a fledgling newspaper business. After four years, the business becomes well established, and Sabra believes that she and her family will stay and grow up there for the rest of their lives. Yancey, however, learns of a new land rush and leaves his family for five years without contact. Yancey returns as if nothing happens and continues his work until 1901 (three years after his return) when, without explanation, he is gone for another twenty-eight years. In the time he is gone his wife builds the newspaper business into an empire and using his profit Yancey runs for governor. Yancey is an advocate for Native American rights however we never find out how his campaign unfolds because the film cuts to another twenty years without a word of Yancey. The film continues and concludes its story with an aged Sabra and her children.
Cimarron suffers from becoming a somewhat aimless mess towards the end of the movie. In the first half, we watch as Yancey makes valid motivations for his family to move beyond to a new land and build a life for themselves, but in the latter, Yancey makes several confusing and unwarranted decisions. Even when Yancey leaves for five years it is clear why he does it, but when he leaves for an additional twenty-eight years soon after his return it is never mentioned why he does it. Cimarron also contains several character conflicts and plot lines that lead to nowhere like when Yancey, who has never shown himself to be religious, is suddenly selected to give a sermon at a church in town, and the scene is never brought up again.
What brings Cimarron out from the depths as an otherwise boring movie, is its lavish production and costume design. Over the forty-year scope of this film, we watch as the shantytown in 1889 our characters started living in, grow and expand to a bustling city in 1928. RKO Pictures purchased 89 acres of land in California to build the full-scale western town and the lot was later turned into RKO Picture's movie ranch. Even the clothes everyone wears advance with the rapid march of time in the movie, from wild west rags on the less fortunate in the film and the flamboyant clothes on the wealthy. All of these clothes change as time progresses in the film. The film's production budget for the movie was $1.4 million (nearly $26 million today) and was the most expensive RKO picture at the time. While a critical success, the film initially lost money at the box office until MGM bought the rights to the movie in 1941 to create a remake that won't happen until 1960.
While Cimarron might have several major problems with its script, its production value is a treat to the eye that anyone can appreciate. There are many less notable but just as promising aspects with the film like its cinematography and camera work and thoughtful choices in its editing. Overall, Cimarron is a professional, expansive epic that was made to wow general audiences and Academy voters into soaring it to the top of that year. Now, ninety years after its release, I can see that Cimarron is a massive film on the surface with a lot of bark, but in between the lines, it has no real bite. It is a film that leaves no real impact through its storytelling, but should by no means be ignored by lovers of the western genre.
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