O Cimarron is the first Western to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and is easily the oldest one I've ever seen. I was surprised by the commitment to the large scale reconstruction of the Oklahoma Osage Boom town and throwing hundreds of extras continually bustling about in the city with period costumes, wagons, and other various props. As the movie progresses, it's fascinating to watch the city grow and modernize over a 40 or so year time period. The true standout of the film is an incredibly epic recreation of the Oklahoma land rush with thousands of settlers rushing for land. Apparently, it took weeks to film and used over 5,000 extras! Unfortunately, the narrative itself isn't that good, as it follows the kind of "Big Man" history about how the world would never be settled and civilized without the courage and vision of truly great men like the main character, Yancey Cravat here. A telling line has another character say, "They will always talk about Yancy. He's gonna be part of the history of the great Southwest. It's men like him that build the world. The rest of them, like me... why, we just come along and live in it." You'd think this would make for an exciting history, but it's actually quite flat and dated in its depictions of African Americans and Indians (all of which were of the time when it was made, but remain hard to watch today). The film is worth a view for the land rush sequence, the art direction, and a couple other little moments like an oddly written church tent meeting and an excellent shootout for 1931 standards with strong location work, firing guns, and wide shots that show the geography and angles create a nice little sequence. It's capped off by a memorable exchange between the hero Yancy Cravet talking to the outlaw he just gunned down, "I never figured we'd end up on opposite sides of the fence kid." The Outlaw Kid replies, "My fault, Yance. Didn't have an invite."
Review of Cimarron
