Starring Richard Dix, Irene Dunne and Estelle Taylor
Produced by RKO Radio Pictures
It's the Old West, a time of Western expansion, and the great Oklahoma land rush is moments from beginning. Wagons and horses are lined up at the border, just waiting for the starter's gun to send them hurtling into the virgin territory to stake their claim.
Among the hopeful horseman is Yancey Cravat. He has scoped out the perfect plot of land upon which to raise a family with his wife Sabra. He just has to get there before anyone else.
Unfortunately, A woman named Dixie Lee takes advantage of Yancey's honor and tricks him into giving up the plot. Undeterred, Yancey returns to Wichita, scoops up Sabra and heads to Osage to start up a newspaper.
In the ensuing years, Osage and the Cravat clan grow up together. The newspaper takes off, Yancey's a respected voice in the town and he and Sabra are blessed with some children. Yancey remains a pioneer by nature however and soon becomes restless in the expanding borough.
Can Yancey quiet his nomadic nature? And how will Sabra deal with Yancey if he threatens to leave?
Cimarron is a movie divided against itself.
On the one hand, it wants to be about a strong, pioneering woman who struggles to establish a newspaper business on the Western frontier. Sabra has to raise a family, keep the home together and increase the paper's circulation while her nomadic husband is constantly away on one of his impulsive adventures. Her strength is finally rewarded when she is elected to Congress despite her husband's absence.
However, the filmmakers are so in live with the husband Yancey and his exploits, they cannot stand taking the camera off of him long enough to give Sabra's story time to breathe.
Emblematic of this problem is the way Yancey's decision to go and get a piece of the Cherokee Strip land rush plays out. After fighting to get his foothold in the Oklahoma Rush, he's leaving his wife and kids for no better reason than wanderlust.
And during the five years he is gone, Sabra presumably does pretty well for herself. I say "presumably" because Cimarron has no interest in showing us how Sabra adapts to having an absentee husband and father. Instead, we fast forward five years to see Yancey's triumphant return to town.
This would be fine if we were meant to get a better understanding of Sabra through Yancey's eyes, but that is not what is going on here. This is 100 percent Yancey's story until the last 15 minutes when the film suddenly decides it is really about Sabra. It's a whiplashing plot mechanism that cannot hope to work.
In the course of carrying out this flawed structure, Cimarron does boast some impressive set-pieces. The opening Oklahoma land rush captures a moment in history I was largely unfamiliar with and carries it out to spectacular effect. There are thousands waiting for that starters gun so they can drive, ride or even run into the territory to make their claim. And once the gun sounds? Bedlam. Chaos. Wagons and riders race across the prairie. Wagon wheels fly. Horses break loose. It feels insane and dangerous.
I also appreciated the shootout that marks the mid-point of the film. The Kid, an old associate of Yancey's, rides into town with his gang, guns blazing. Yancey takes it upon himself to save the town and takes out each of the outlaws one by one.
The action is shot with a great sense of space and geography. We know where everyone is throughout the scene which only ups the tension as it reaches its endgame.
No discussion of Cimarron would be complete without some discussion of its portrayal of race, especially as embodied by the black serving boy Isaiah and the stereotypically Jewish Sol.
Yes, these portrayals are offensive by today's standards. However, Cimarron is not making an argument for the superiority of a race (as The Birth of a Nation despicably tried to). Instead, it thinks it is being progressive (which it may have been in its own time).
That leads to some bizarre juxtapositions as we lurch from a scene of Yancey arguing for citizenship for Indians to a moment with an actress playing an Indian looking and speaking like the most stereotypical version of such a character you can imagine. Or giving Isaiah a key, prominent role in Yancey's life, but having the boy exclaim how excited he is that their town sells watermelons. It's uncomfortable and ugly.
Richard Dix plays Yancey and there is no secret as to why he is cast; the man has one of the richest baritone voices you are likely to hear, which would be attractive to studios still figuring out the talkies. His acting? Well, he has a wonderful voice, right?
Irene Dunne's role is pretty thankless for the first three quarters of the film, but she shines during the final stanza. The character actors are hit or miss.
Cimarron has some basic flaws in its structure that lead to mixed themes and messages, but it gets points for some ambitious moments. I just wish the film's self-congratulatory supposed advancement of minorities in film didn't end up so stereotypical and racist.
**1/2 out of *****
NOTE: Cimarron won the 1931 Best Picture Oscar.
NOTE: Cimarron won the 1931 Best Picture Oscar.
0 comments:
Post a Comment