4. Cimarron

Cimarron Movie Poster

I love old westerns. They bring back memories of childhood, watching John Wayne with my Daddy. That's why when I saw that #4 on the list was a western, I got really excited. What I found was that while this western wasn't exactly what I expected, it was fascinating in many ways.

Cimarron takes place in the early days of the Oklahoma Land Run in 1889. The tale starts on the morning of the Land Run, and the scene that ensues once it begins is utter chaos as wagons laden with people and men and women on horseback ride off to find their perfect claim. There's even a man on a bicycle in the run. It was amazing to me to watch this scene, and I wonder how many people and animals got hurt in its filming.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The tale centers around a pioneering newspaper editor named Yancey Cravat who moves to Oklahoma with his wife and son to be part of the excitement. He likens the results of the land run to the miracle of creation. They are joined by a stowaway, Isaiah, an African-American boy who has escaped the harsh realities of life as a servant in Wichita, Kansas.

Irene Dunn as Sabra and Richard Dix as Yancey Cravat
 in Cimarron

Yancey is an enigmatic figure. He is well known throughout the state and the territory. He was once a lawyer before becoming a newspaper editor. And he has a unique way at looking at the world. He truly believes in treating those around him with complete and utter respect. Where others look down on the Cherokee and treat them with disdain, he understands their plight and sympathizes with them. Along with the Indians, he also stands up for a Jewish man and a woman of ill repute. Further, he's an excellent shot and one of the first actions he does when he moves to town is to kill the leader of a gang. Ironically, this takes place in the middle of a sermon he's been asked to give since there is no preacher in town. The realities of the wild west! When he kills the outlaw called 'The Kid', he turns down the idea of a reward. He knew 'The Kid' before he had turned bad and felt that circumstances had led him to a life of crime. He felt bad for killing him but knew that he had to protect his family and community.

All of the above makes Yancey seem truly heroic. However, there was a huge chink in his armor: as the Allman Brothers would sing many years later, he was born a ramblin' man. He told his wife that the longest he'd ever been in a place was five years and it felt like a jail sentence. Once they were established in Osage, Oklahoma, Yancey decided to leave his wife Sabra with a son and a baby daughter in 1893.

Irene Dunne in Cimarron

To me, this is when I realized that the story was really not about Yancey, but instead about Sabra. She takes over the paper and makes it flourish. She still is true to him and leaves his name on it as editor. She knows he'll return. And he does in 1898 after serving in the Spanish American War.


Things look good again. Time flies and in 1907, he's running to be governor. Oil has been discovered on the Osage Reservation. When a city elder tries to get him involved in a scheme to take the oil from them, he is disgusted and chooses to write an editorial about the plight of the Indians. In this, he calls for them to get complete citizenship in the United States. His wife begs him not to do it because she knows it will ruin his chances in the election, but he says he must. Then he leaves her again.

Statue at the end of Cimarron

We jump forward to 1929 and see Sabra has modernized the paper, and it is thriving under her. She still believes in Yancey and has kept his name as the editor. Then by 1930, we see that she has been elected to Congress. She goes to visit an oil well with visiting dignitaries when an explosion is averted by a man who has sacrificed himself to save the rest. It is Yancey. His last words to her are: "Wife and Mother. Stainless woman. Hide me. Hide me in your love." At the same time, a statue is being unveiled to the pioneer spirit. When the cloth is ripped off, it looks exactly like Yancey and a woman is crouching behind him.

Okay, so I finished the movie and was confused. Was Yancey a hero or not? While the movie portrayed him as larger than life throughout and his wife never truly complained or got angry with him for his leaving, I felt cold at the end. I knew the story was originally written by a woman, Edna Ferber. So I decided to do a little research. What I found made the entire story make sense to me: Cimarron is a satire. Here, the backbone of building the community was this strong woman, Sabra. In the book version of the story, Sabra is shown as being even more self reliant. She only found her own power because Yancey left her, becoming a feminist in the process. Plus, she understood the importance of women to 'civilizing' the territory. Without Sabra and women like her, the author implies, the territory would never have truly been tamed. The irony comes to full fruition at the end of the movie when the statue is revealed to not be a woman but a man, Yancey, portrayed as the protector of the weak and the true pioneer.

The movie was adapted from the book by screenwriter Howard Estabrook. His treatment of the story left out the irony and left a much weaker story for it, in my opinion. Nonetheless, I marvel at the scope of the movie for the time it was created. It cost more than $1.5 million dollars to create, extraordinarily expensive for the time. The Land Grab scene included more than 5,000 extras. It is one of only two films to receive Academy Award nominations in every category. (The other was Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?)

Other thoughts:

1. I was amazed at the job the filmmakers did at showing how Osage developed from its earliest days where lawyers were working out of tents to settle land disputes to 1929 where it is a thriving metropolis. Each new year brought new buildings and modes of transportation. Further, the characters changed with the times. Really well done.
2. The filmmaker heavily relied on title cards to move from period to period. While some of this was fine, the ones that were full of exposition hearkened back to the days of silent pictures and seemed overly intrusive to the story. 
3. The evolution of Sabra from a bigot to an independent and tolerant woman was fascinating to watch. 

I will be putting up the Beat Sheet for this one soon.