Best Picture Winner: #4
Release Date: February 9, 1931
Rating: Passed
Runtime: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Director: Wesley Ruggles
Quick Impressions:
I set my expectations too high for this one. Based on a novel by Edna Ferber, starring Irene Dunne, featuring Edna May Oliver, Cimarron sounded great. As a child, I was not fond of Westerns, but I like where the genre has gone from the 90s forward. (And actually, as an adult, I have new appreciation for older westerns.) Plus I used to live in Oklahoma, just for a short time, spring of second grade, fall of third.
Even though I’m a Texan, sworn by an unspoken oath to look down at the state to our north, I actually loved Oklahoma when I lived there. We had a beautiful new house which we could surprisingly afford (thanks to financial disaster there). Braums was right around the corner, so we could walk there in the evening for a treat of delicious cheeseburgers and hand-scooped shakes. The elephants at the zoo were red (because of the clay-like dirt they rolled in). The elementary school was brand new, bright, open and airy. They did have a tornado drill every single day the week I arrived, which I thought was excessive. But I forgave them once I learned that my first day of school marked the one year anniversary of the old school building being destroyed by a tornado.
Because our school was so new, we got to vote to choose a mascot. I voted for The Sunset Sooners (because I liked the alliteration), but The Sunset Twisters won the day. (I think that’s when I finally learned what had happened to the old school.)
Sooners and Boomers and other territory-starved participants begin this movie which opens with the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. Watching the initial mad scramble, my daughter and I thought the movie showed early sparks of promise. But then we met the film’s protagonists.
Plot:
Ostensibly, Cimarron is about the settling of Oklahoma. But more accurately, it’s about a mis-matched married couple named Yancey and Sabra Cravat who run a newspaper and can’t stand to live with each other. Sabra wants to bring polite society to the new territory. But Yancey went to the new territory deliberately to escape society. He can’t decide if he’s Huckleberry Finn or the angel of justice. Sabra quickly cultivates a friendship with the snooty, judgmental Edna May Oliver character. Yancey can’t bother to tell them where he’s going when he disappears for years at a time. Somehow, their son Cimarron turns out to be a decent person and marries his childhood friend Ruby, daughter of an Osage chief. Everyone else in the family is very hard to like.
The Good:
This movie has not aged well. Perhaps in 1931 viewers found it more palatable. After hearing my daughter’s blunt verdict on the film (i.e. “It’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”), my mother wondered why it won Best Picture in the first place. We talked about that for a while. My best guess is that people embraced Cimarron to show support for Oklahomans, then suffering horribly because of the Dust Bowl. It’s got to be something like that. And maybe the movie played better in its own era.
I know there’s at least one remake of the film. Maybe the 1960 version starring Glenn Ford is better. (It certainly couldn’t be worse!) I’m curious about Edna Ferber’s novel. I might read it. Maybe something is getting lost from page to screen.
One good thing I can say about the movie is that the film itself wants us to sympathize, even empathize with all the outcasts polite society of the time is rejecting—the African American boy, the Jewish clothing merchant, the printer who stutters, the fallen woman, the betrayed and abused Native Americans. These are pretty much the only sympathetic characters in the movie.
The performances are also good. Irene Dunne and Richard Dix are playing a frustrating pair. She’s small-minded. He’s self-righteous. They’re both so relentlessly aggravating that it’s impossible for us to root for either. But the actors play this annoying couple convincingly. Edna May Oliver is delightful as the town busybody. And George E. Stone makes aspiring clothing merchant Sol Levy so sympathetic that my daughter and I were constantly asking, “Why isn’t she leaving her husband and marrying you?” I mean, her husband abandons her. He disappears for five years without sending so much as a post card. Surely that’s grounds for divorce. (Maybe it would be a problem that Sol Levy is Jewish, but I mean, her current husband thinks he’s God, so that seems problematic to me, too.)
Eugene Jackson is easy to root for as our favorite character Isaiah. I keep trying to decide if it’s his performance that’s so good, or the character’s abysmal circumstances that make us naturally root for him. I’m now discovering that Jackson continued acting until the 1990s, so I’m curious to watch some of his other performances.
Estelle Taylor is also excellent as Dixie Lee. In fact, at first I thought it was Irene Dunne playing that role. Then when the real Irene Dunne appeared, I realized my mistake. (She looks even more like herself than someone who looks vaguely like her.) I wish Irene Dunne had played that character, or that Estelle Taylor had been the female star of the film. Either way, Dixie Lee is by far the most interesting woman in this movie with the most potential as the leading woman. Her first interaction with Richard Dix’s Yancey led me to believe that the film had some potential. My heart sank when I realized that she was actually just a minor character. Perhaps Dixie Lee plays a bigger role in the novel. Perhaps some of the seedy rumors the film mentions are true and that storyline is developed in the book. A girl can hope.
Best Scene Visually:
Remember Miss Havisham sitting there in her bridal gown next to her moldering old wedding cake? If you’ve read Great Expectations, I’m sure that you do. When I first read the book, I remember shaking my head in confusion, flipping back a page and reading more carefully again, thinking surely I had misunderstood.
We get a great, double-take shock like that in Cimarron, too, by far the most unforgettable image of the film. I’m not sure how shocking it would have been in 1931, but my daughter and I had to pick up our jaws off the floor.
“They have a human child as their ceiling fan?” I exclaimed as she died of horror.
That’s right. Watching the opening credits (which feature the actors themselves standing by their names), we wondered why the African American Isaiah (who looks about eleven) had no last name. This scene shed a lot of light on that.
In a booming announcer voice, my daughter joked, “And starring Isaiah as the ceiling fan!”
My how times have changed!
This poor child is lying above the dinner table on some unstable rafter-contraption, looking like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, keeping everyone cool with a reed fan. And the old harridan in charge is always barking at him, “Isaiah! Keep fanning!” Then he falls onto the table and ends up covered in everyone’s mashed potatoes.
How hilarious! Everyone breaks into laughter, and then Isaiah gets in trouble.
Watching, my daughter and I almost died. She said, “I hate this movie. The only one I like is Isaiah. Well, the little kid who hasn’t talked yet is okay, too.” That was Cimarron.
I realize that the Yancey character is vaguely against the way the family behaves in general, but he really doesn’t treat Isaiah much better himself. In fact, he gets him killed, then doesn’t even notice!
Another memorable visual comes when Yancey quietly files a notch into his gun after shooting a man dead. There are a lot of notches on that gun.
Best Scene:
Honestly, the most gutting scene in the film is the death of a certain character who is trying desperately to get someone’s attention, calling out feebly, again and again, unnoticed.
Best Action Sequence:
I’m extremely fond of the scene with the wounded horse in which Dixie Lee asks for help. Of course, it is sad that Yancey has to shoot her horse. But what happens next is so delightful. That’s really the kind of counterpart Yancey needs to challenge him. If I were making the movie, the female lead would be Dixie Lee.
Another great action sequence happens in the church. For some reason, Yancey is asked to be the pastor. But it’s a weird church. Everybody in town goes, even non-Christians, which I guess is good. But I feel the church sends a mixed message. For one thing, it’s held in the casino/saloon/brothel. There’s a picture of a woman lounging in bed hanging behind the “pulpit.” The words below it read, “Open all day and night.” Then just before he’s about to preach his sermon, instead the “pastor” reads a random Bible verse, then shoots someone dead. It’s an exciting church. (My description of this scene probably makes the movie sound good, and it is as a curiosity. It’s a lot of fun to watch and heckle.)
The Negatives:
A movie shouldn’t be condemned for being a product of its own time. I don’t know if the 1931 audience would have found the human ceiling fan shocking. Possibly. But I’m guessing they wouldn’t have had a problem when Yancey rolls into town in his wagon and points out to his runaway companion, “Look Isaiah, watermelons!” And then Isaiah crows, “Oh boy, I sure do love watermelons,” or something. These things make you wince and realize how far movies have come. Now the racism is much more insidiously encoded, not so blatant and oblivious.
But wince-worthy moments like these are not what make the movie bad. They can be hard to watch because this is 2020, and as awful as our society is, these days, it’s just not cool to use an African American child as a ceiling fan and then show him leering at watermelons. But that was 1931. Moments like these could be an unfortunate stain on an otherwise great movie.
But the movie isn’t otherwise great. It’s not even good.
For me, the problem is that neither protagonist is likeable in the least. My daughter felt the same way. Both Sabra and Yancey are awful, albeit in different ways. Sabra is small-minded, and even though her desire for home and stability resonates with me, her views are unpalatable in this era. But Yancey, while progressive in this thinking and theoretically pro-tolerance and anti-hate, is totally oblivious to his own bad behavior.
He’s so self-righteous. He quotes scripture, then uses it for his own purposes. He hates society and finds living in society intolerable, but for him, “society” seems to mean anybody else besides him doing exactly what he wants all of the time. He repeatedly abandons his family on a whim. He does whatever he’s thinking of at the moment. He pleads for Native American rights and condemns the society that casts stones at the “fallen woman.” But he himself indirectly causes the death of Isaiah, then just walks right by him, oblivious to his desperate cries. It’s somehow worse that Yancey actually doesn’t notice Isaiah dying. His obliviousness is not pretense. When he repeatedly condemns society, he seems to forget that he is a member of society (much as he struggles not to be). Repeatedly, this man recites scripture and relates it to his own experiences. In the beginning of the movie, he talks about how God created the Earth in six days. Then he says that what just happened to him was even more astounding in just one day. Later on, he uses a Bible verse to justify inciting a shooting in church. I kept wanting to yell, “Have you ever heard this one, ‘Hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’?”
Meanwhile, Sabra, his wife, starts a ladies’ group for the purpose of looking down her nose at all the inferior people in town. She almost dies when her son marries a Native American, and she raises her daughter to be an entitled, money-grubbing creep. She also takes for granted the people who stay loyal to her and help her. Instead of showing appreciation for them, she idealizes her absent husband who never even sends her a post card.
Overall:
Cimarron was fun to watch but hard to like. Although it does show some interesting events related to the settling of Oklahoma, the film’s protagonists make it impossible to root for them. It doesn’t help that they use a child as their ceiling fan, but beyond that, they’re just very unsympathetic people. Without a likeable protagonist to embrace, the movie falls flat. It’s easily the worst of the four Best Picture winners we have watched so far. I would like to see it remade for this era, though. The events wouldn’t need to change necessarily, but the characters need some serious work.