Released in 1931, "Cimarron" won the fourth best picture Oscar. Being produced and released in the middle of the great depression, I expected to see a small scale movie that relied more on character than anything else. I was wrong. "Cimarron" turned out to be a large scale blockbuster of a movie. It featured gun fights, politics and even courtroom drama.
The movie tells the tale of the settlement of Oklahoma after the release of the land by the government. It centers around a man named Yancy Cravat, who starts a newspaper, runs a church, fights in the Spanish-American War and runs for Governor. At first it felt like a western retelling of "Citizen Kane", another RKO production. However, it had a lot of messages that I would not expect from a movie from this time period.
The movie itself shows the downside to the exploration that men would do during this time period. Men would leave their family behind to go exploring and search for that new opportunity. In the movie we see two different women affected by men leaving them. One of them is not able to follow any options and is forced to become a whore. The other is eventually elected to congress. This message of women empowerment was surprising and was not something I was expecting from a movie labeled as a western.
The movie doesn't just stop with empowering women. It also made statements about the treatment of Native Americans. Besides being a second message that this movie was trying to make, it came as a surprise since the movie starts with many racial slurs against Native Americans that wouldn't be acceptable by today's standards.
However the movie makes a smart move by centering the movie around Yancy Cravat, who comes across as one of the action heroes of today that everyone would love. He did the right thing and was a real man's man. By having this be the center of the movie they could make the statements they wanted to make and still have a movie that would be accepted by the audience.
Overall the movie was a pleasant surprise and I give it 4 out of 5 stars. Next on the list, "Grand Hotel."
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