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**½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras A- starring Richard Dix, Irene Dunne, Estelle Taylor, Nance O'Neil screenplay by Howard Estabrook, based on the novel by Edna Ferber directed by Wesley Ruggles
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Not exactly a proper western (but not exactly any other kind of genre piece), Cimarron is sort of a thesis-statement historical melodrama, establishing the greatness of the West's upswing while capping off with distinct dissatisfaction over its levelling off. Like its male lead, Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), the film is beguiled by the idea of rising American "civilization" to the detriment of the idea of permanent settlement. Still, it's quick to note the silent suffering of Yancey's wife, Sabra (Irene Dunne), who naturally has to stay behind as he follows his wanderlust once the initial stake grows gentrified. But though the pull between conservative home and wild, liberal prairie doesn't add up to killer cinema (and is further hobbled by this being an early sound production), as a symptomatic powder keg, Cimarron is endlessly fascinating.
This is a domestic squabble in the final days of frontier living. Our man Yancey is an incorrigible adventurer who uproots his girl from Kansas gentility to participate in 1880s Oklahoma expansion by building a town called Osage. He's got big dreams, and his wife isn't sure what to think about his constant standing up for the underdog, i.e., his constant putting himself in harm's way. Thankfully, Yancey is one of those indestructible Westerners able to stump for the Natives (despite having walked off with much of their land), get on the wrong side of the town thugs (and deal them death in a gunfight), and start a frank-speaking newspaper (alienating the powerful in turn) while remaining as chipper as Hugh Beaumont on sweater-discount day. Sabra persists in pleading for home and hearth against the concepts of danger and justice, but the movie never quite does away with the idea that she might have a glimmer of a point.
Indeed, the film is embarrassedly aware of Sabra's plight, especially when she's blown over for five years as another settlement attracts her husband's will-to-thrill. Though she's largely fobbed off when she points out that she's been the one to keep the newspaper empire together, she gains ground during Cimarron's final moments: to Hell with this, I'm entering politics! A weird turn-around occurs where this woman we've associated with cloistered domesticity suddenly means something outside the sphere of home–although by then, there's no more frontier for the concept to mean much. It's telling that by the time Oklahoma has become a state and the city has replaced the town, Sabra can rise while Yancey is a shattered drifter without home or purpose.
Dedicated to watching the town grow from a jerrybuilt free-for-all into the western town of legend, the film is frankly sentimental and a little ridiculous for it. Leaving aside the fact that Dix looks uncannily like latter-day comedian Andy Kaufman, his gee-whiz delivery and incessant didactic speechifying render him hard to swallow as a naturalistic character. And there's lots of cheap "comic relief" in the form of stuttering storekeepers, whimsical Jewish merchants, and, most queasily, a Buckwheat-ish black servant named Isaiah (Eugene Jackson) who buys it in the big battle against the badfolk. Yet in its commitment to being at cross-purposes with itself (its sympathy and damnation for the female lead, its sticking up for the homeless Indians, its presentation of a society that will have no room for its architects), Cimarron manages to be bizarrely compelling. If it's less than a great film, it is, for its many contradictions, an interesting anomaly.
THE DVD Scratches and flickering bedevil Cimarron on DVD, precluding a completely stable image, though the transfer itself wrings a remarkable amount of fine detail from the battered source. The Dolby 1.0 mono sound also suffers from hiss and is a little tinny besides, although there are no serious challenges to audibility.
Warner's commitment to providing contemporary shorts for their classic titles continues with Nick Grinde's The Devil's Cabaret (16 mins.), a defiantly pre-Code musical-comedy in two-strip Technicolor detailing the adventures of one of Satan's helpers as he drums up business for the place downstairs. You'll be flabbergasted by the sauciness of (admittedly weak) double-entendres and constant innuendo, which culminate in a bunch of chorines in tutus dancing around a gigantic devil's head. (Must be seen to be believed–and worth it.) Meanwhile, Rudolf Ising's Red-Headed Baby (6 mins.) is a cartoon featuring dolls and toy soldiers dancing and singing to the title song; the romance between a doll and a toy Napoleon is interrupted only by a giant menacing rubber spider dispatched just in time for a happy ending. It's entirely standard, but also plenty of fun.
125 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
