Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Wicked??? (hopefully not Wicked.) Cimarron is the fourth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. Cimarron inhabits a strange place in the retrospective history of the Oscars as it is the first to see critical consensus really turn against it over time. A sweeping epic — the Academy loved themselves an epic in the early days — about the development of the Oklahoma territory over 40 years, Wesley Ruggles film has certainly seen its star fade over the years. Richard Dix plays Yancey Cravet, an attorney, pioneer, gunslinger and any number of other things who moves his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) to the newly opened Oklahoma frontier to stake out the stolen land and develop it into an engine of the United States. Over his life Yancey flirts with danger and frequently disappears in search of new adventure while Sabra is left raising their family and running the newspaper business Yancey began.
Extraordinarily well received in 1931, the film plays quite poorly in stretches today. Just because slurs and racist caricatures were commonplace in the time does not make them any more palatable today. Sabra especially is constantly spouting vitriol and racist stereotypes about Native Americans and the characterization of a young Black kid that accompanies and occasionally works for the Cravats ranges from problematic to cruel. For all its dated problems though, Yancey’s character is something of a progressive conundrum. He calls out the theft of land from Natives even as he actively involved in the stealing. He calls for Native American citizenship and fights the attempts to steal Osage oil. When his son falls for a Native woman, its Yancey, the hero of the film, that defends him against the racist abuse of Sabra. As badly as much of it has aged, there are parts of Cimarron that do stand up to some extent. As a piece of filmmaking almost none of Cimarron holds up to modern scrutiny. The sprawl of time from 1889 through to 1930 is unwieldy and often confounding. Despite a runtime over two hours, very little time is spent on any particular sequence leading to many scenes lacking context and motivation. A connection between Yancey and an outlaw who rolls through town is hinted at but never explored. It is implied that a young woman who steals Yancey’s horse and claims land he had wanted is a prostitute and she is put on trial for charges and reasons that are not entirely clear. Looking at Cimarron through the lens of film history it does make some sense why it won the Best Picture award. In the early years of sound film audiences and critics seemed wowed by the scope and scale of visual storytelling that had not yet been seen. A forty year odyssey on the literal writing of American history and myth must have really appealed to the nascent film industry that was in the process of writing their own evolution. That said, the unsavory and downright evil erasure of Native American history that this film tacitly lionizes makes Cimarron feel like a relic best left to the past. 3/10
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