Cimarron

Cimarron the 4th movie to win best picture and the first western to win. The movie follows a family during the turn of the 20 century as Oklahoma goes from Indian territory to statehood. It starts with a great land rush scene and how Yancey Cravat an adventurer moves his wife and son to a small town and starts a little local newspaper. We get to see the town grow into a big city and how people change.

The first time I saw this movie a while back I thought it was the worst movie to win best picture. Now after watching it a second time I still think its one of the worst movies to win. I hate to say it was good for its time because it wasn't. All Quiet on the Western Front won the year before was a great movie, and Charlie Chaplin's movie City Lights (which is on The American Film Institutes Top 100 movies of all time) and Fritz Lang's movie M (although its in German is a great movie and ranks on IMDB list of top 250 movies) both came out the same year as Cimarron. Neither of those two movies were nominated for best picture proving that the academy except in a few cases was never very good at nominating movies that will go on to be classics.

So what made Cimarron so bad. It was just boring. After the initial land rush scene which was the most exciting part of the movie it was all downhill from there. Typical with other early 30's movies there was no background music. I read somewhere that directors felt it would confuse the audience if there was background music and they didn't know where it was coming from. Also the acting was a little over the top, and the story kind of meanders. The biggest problem I had with the movie was the racial stereotypes. Maybe I am a product of the age of political correctness but it seems like this movie set out to offend everyone, Blacks, Indians, Jews, and people with disabilities. I know that at the time these things weren't considered but it made it a little difficult to watch for me. I find it interesting that the Disney movie Song of the South has never been released on DVD in the United States because of the racial stereotypes but no one seems to have a problem with this movie and I think the racial stereotypes in this movie were much worse.

The one scene that was very odd to me was the Gospel meeting they had during the early creation of the town. During this gospel meeting they ask Yancey to give a little sermon even though he is not a minister. So during the sermon he is talking about some outlaws then he pulls out his gun and shots the outlaw that is there. Then he says "Fellow citizens! Under the circumstances, we will fore go the sermon and conclude this service with a brief word of prayer". Guess after killing someone the only thing left to do is pray. Very odd.


Some other options from 1931 if you are looking for a good movie