Cimarron

Winner of the 1932 Oscars for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (for Richard Dix), and Best Actress (for Irene Dunne).

The Western has always been a staple of Hollywood filmmaking. The first feature film was a Western, and in the early days of Hollywood just about every film made was either a Western, a gangster movie, a war movie, or a musical. So it isn't surprising that it only took four years for Oscar to honor a Western as Best Picture. Much more surprising is the fact that, since that time, only one other Western has taken the same award. Movie trivia: which film was it? Answer at the end of this review.

The film tells the story of Yancey Cravat, the adventurous heir of a wealthy family, who packs up his wife and young son to head across the newly opened border of the Oklahoma territory in 1889 and into the Cimarron, or the wildlands. His wife, Sabra, is initially thrilled to be brought along, but quickly finds that Yancey's enthusiasm for frontier living often interferes with his abilities to keep his family safe. Within a few days, Yancey has become both sheriff of the town and proprietor of its only newspaper. Soon thereafter, he also becomes the preacher at the town's multi-denominational church. At about this point in the picture, the viewer expects that, by film's end, Yancey will have single-handedly civilized the West, cured all of the world's diseases, and invented a time machine to pre-emptively kill Hitler and prevent World War II.

By modern standards, the film is pretty laughable. Hollywood was, of course, still in transition from silent films to sound, and it shows here. The sound mixing is poor, with lines of dialogue frequently getting overwhelmed by background noise. More importantly, the acting is an embarrassment to the profession. The performances, across the board, are overwrought and hammy, clearly the product of a profession that had not yet adapted to the technology of the time. Actors were still used to giving either silent film performances, in which exaggerated gestures and facial expressions had to be used to compensate for words that could not be spoken, or stage acting performances, in which dialogue had to be loud and over-enunciated in order to ensure that the entire audience could hear. These performance styles left very little room for subtlety. What little subtlety may have been left was stomped into the ground by stereotypes, racial and otherwise. From the African-American servant boy who stows away with the Cravat family, to the Indians whose land is stolen to build up the frontier town, to the Jewish salesman, to the blue-blooded lady who sits next to Mrs. Cravat in church, to the stuttering newspaper editor, and so on, not a single performance in this film seems natural or true, not a single character believable or realistic in any way. Also, for somebody who is supposed to come across as a rugged, wilderness adventure seeker type, Yancey Cravat spends most of the movie looking suspiciously like somebody who just got out of a chair after getting make-up, a haircut, and possibly a manicure, rather than somebody who just got out of a gunfight or off of the dusty trail.

Action scenes in the film are often muddled and confusing, as well. Some of this is due to lack of technology, some to the standards of the time. Every time that somebody in the film is shot, the camera cuts to the person doing the shooting, then back to the person who is shot, as though to avoid the "graphic violence" of actually showing somebody pretend to get shot.

Of course, the film, for the most part, cannot be blamed for being outdated and unsophisticated. It was made 78 years ago, a product of a newly-developing artform, made using the technology and sensibilities of its time. It would be unfair to expect Cimarron to hold up to today's standards. That being said, the only reason to watch this film is for historical purposes, for the sake of seeing what films were deemed worthy of acclaim at the time this one was made. And that is where I come in. MovieDrew: watching the Oscar-winners so you don't have to.

Movie trivia answer: The other Western to win the Oscar for Best Picture, 61 years after this one, was Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.