Oscars Retrospective: Cimarron (4th Academy Awards Review)
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On November 10th, 1931, the 4th Academy Awards took place to hand out some awards and name Cimarron as the Outstanding Production of the time period from July 1930 to June 1931. That’s about the beginning and end of the trivia for this ceremony so I’m going to stop mentioning them every time unless there’s something worth talking about for the ceremony itself.
Cimarron is interesting in that it’s the first Oscar win that wasn’t really revolutionary. You could argue the first 3 movies all being big groundbreakers in the art of film but that’s not really the case here. In addition, Cimarron was the first, and one of the very few, Oscar wins that was a box office failure as it failed to recoup its budget during its initial theatrical run.
Cimarron is a historical drama set around the turn of the 20th Century that revolves around a couple called the Cravats, Yancey (Richard Dix) and Sabra (Irene Dunne). After the new territory of Oklahoma opens up to settlers, the two decide to join in the land rush and move into a settler town called Osage. There, Yancey sets up a newspaper and becomes a leader in the community as the two strive to turn Osage into a respectable town.
It isn’t long, however, before Yancey’s honest morals and no-nonsense attitude puts him on the wrong side of the local outlaw, Lon Yountis (Stanley Fields). Yountis controls Osage and wants to run the town however he likes. Yancey is the only one who can stand up to him and the two begin threatening each other and- hang on, isn’t this the same plot as Road House (1989)? It’s pretty rare that you see Academy Award winners share stories with Patrick Swayze action films.
For all the build-up it’s given, the whole Yountis storyline is resolved relatively early in the film. Pretty quickly, I might add. In fact, I’d say disappointingly so. The rest of the movie then details Yancey and Sabra’s lives as Osage grows and grows, spanning a 40-year time period, detailing Oklahoma’s transformation into a state and how the world changes during that time.
I don’t even know where to begin with how much I hate this freaking movie. I already mentioned how what seems like a cool plot is resolved in a very lazy and lackluster manner but that’s just scratching the surface. Probably the best way to talk about Cimarron would be to tackle its problems in order.
The film opens up with the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 where thousands of settlers lined up to dash into the new territory to get their own piece of land. This scene was considered a spectacle back in the day and the movie’s most memorable moment. While it is still impressive to watch, unfortunately, it suffers from the lack of music of the time period. In a modern film, this sort of scene would have this sweeping orchestra to give a sense of awe and power. Instead, it’s all silent except for the charging of hooves and screaming which makes it sound Hellish and chaotic (which I don’t think was the intention).
This has prevented the scene from aging with grace. While we can chalk that up to a limitation of the time period, I remain skeptical that it was beyond the filmmakers’ abilities at this time. Cimarron’s sound design is very competent throughout and there’s even a scene in a church where they have the whole congregation sing a hymn and then amplify the voice of whoever’s close-up we’re in. That’s some pretty complex sound design so placing a musical soundtrack shouldn’t have been too far off. But, eh, musical overtures didn’t become commonplace for another 2 years, so we’ll let it slide. Technical specs aside, if a movie’s most memorable scene is in the first ten minutes, that’s a problem.
After the Lon Yountis plotline is resolved, we get to the heart of the movie where Yancey will frequently leave his wife and kids at the drop of a hat for years at a time. They say he does this because he’s a “free spirit” which is a fancy way of saying that he’s “the kind of deadbeat who considers raising a family as a side project.” It’s not like he’s leaving them to go fight in a war or try to find the cure for polio or something important; he just heard that there’s some new settlements popping up and he wants to go check them out and if his family doesn’t want to come with him, too bad, so sad.
He eventually does come back, and his wife is understandably pissed off and the bastard chews her out for it. I wouldn’t mind so much except the movie very clearly wants you to take his side. Like, yeah, he’s the free spirit who can’t be contained and it’s okay for him to flaunt his obligations while expecting his wife to uphold her own. What makes it even better is that we don’t even see his adventure; this portion of the film focuses on Sabra just having to raise the kids and manage Osage on her own.
Cimarron also tries to get a little forward-thinking by portraying Yancey as a progressive individual that stands up for oppressed minorities, such as Native Americans and prostitutes. This is probably why Cimarron won the Oscar. One of the major conflicts in the film is Yancey and Sabra arguing over how to treat these minorities. The problem is that you don’t actually get to know any of the Native Americans or prostitutes that Yancey sticks up for. Sure, you see them, you know their names, but you don’t know a thing about them. Honestly, I don’t think a single Native American actor gets a line throughout the movie. They’re just things that you take care of. Y’know, like dogs.
This is the sort of slacktivism that many films that get nominated for or win the Oscar espouse and is very popular in Hollywood. They make a film about the white guy who sticks up for minorities without having to actually focus on these minorities and they all then get to pat themselves on the back for doing the right thing. And while you could argue that this was back in the 30s so this was considered progressive at the time, it still doesn’t make for an especially interesting movie because these morals feel almost tacked-on.
Even taking the moral out of the movie, though, I really hate Yancey Cravat. This guy is such a condescending, hypocritical piece of garbage who absolutely should not, under any circumstances, be held up as an idealized character. I especially love how he tries to pass himself off as this forward-thinking progressive person who fights for the little man, but he also talks down to and condescends the token black character.
The Cravats have a black servant who tags along with them for the journey named Isaiah (Eugene Jackson) who happens to be a very racist depiction of a black man. He’s an incompetent moron who sucks at everything he does and is really, really irritating. All of his mannerisms do nothing but grate your nerves then you remember that he’s a racist caricature and then you only get more angry. It also makes you annoyed at the film's climactic pandering about equal rights for minorities when its portrayal of minority characters are either nonexistent or obviously racist. I would call Isaiah the most annoying character in the movie, but we have Yancey’s printer (Roscoe Ates) with an obnoxiously fake stutter for that.
The film’s story structure also fails to impress. Years will fly by between scenes which can work if they’re just going over the important stuff but they’re not just going over the important stuff. Whenever you get to a big moment, it doesn’t feel like an earned or jaw-dropping moment, you’re just left scratching your head confused, feeling like you missed a scene.
For example, there’s a scene where a bandit called the Kid (William Collier Jr.) attacks Osage completely out of nowhere and Yancey fights him. However, earlier in the movie, it’s established that Yancey and the Kid are friends with each other. So, then why is the Kid attacking Yancey’s town? Did they fall out? When and why did they fall out? Does the Kid not care? Why doesn’t he care anymore?
Nowhere is this more apparent than during the last 20 minutes of the film. Now, to Cimarron’s credit, this part of the movie is pretty solid. It takes place many years later as Sabra is now an old woman (with some really good and convincing make-up), reflecting on her life’s work and how much Osage has changed. She reconnects and reflects with all of the side characters that we’ve gotten to know over the course of the movie and she’s invited to a celebratory dinner where she talks about how much she’s learned.
She gives a final speech that’s actually a pretty solid speech that manages to convey the heart and lesson of the movie without being too preachy. It’s a nice collection of scenes that gives the impression that you’ve come to the end of a lifelong journey with these characters. But that’s the problem: you haven’t been on a lifelong journey with these characters. You’ve seen pieces of that journey but you haven’t actually undergone a change.
Literally the scene right before this sequence was supposed to be the catalyst for Sabra’s change and then it jumps forward to her as an old woman. If this is supposed to be the heart of the movie, about how Sabra learned from Yancey how to become more accepting, then that’s where the damn movie should’ve begun. It’s not like they couldn’t have pulled it off either as Irene Dunne’s performance as Sabra Cravat is easily the best thing in the movie.
Cimarron is the prime example of a movie that’s aged really badly. When it first came out, it was the critical darling of the year and was fast-tracked to winning the Oscar. Nowadays, though, it’s viewed much less favorably. Even ignoring the offensive racism and hypocritical main character, the movie feels very phony. This is like the opposite problem of The Broadway Melody: a good ending ruined by a terrible movie. The last act is solid but because the rest of the movie surrounding feels so divorced, it just feels insincere.
And in case you’re thinking that this is the first movie to have this kind of epic story that spans several decades, it really wasn’t. The Birth of a Nation (1917) accomplished that over 15 years before this point and, even before that, there was Cecil B. DeMille’s directorial debut, The Squaw Man (1914). Seeing films that spanned this length of time was nothing new. If you get the chance to pass up on this movie, I recommend that you take it and never look back.
But was it the best film of the year?
In case you missed it:
1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2
2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2
3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2
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