Throughout this course I will be telling you which of the films, actors, d rectors and composers were nominated or won Academy awards, but please understand that the Academy Awards are themselves a form of entertainment and they have also always been controversial. Critics accuse the institution of being rigged by insiders, riddled with corruption and overly commercial. I think all three accusations are true. Just consider the case of Cimarron. This film beat out much better films such as City Lights, and Frankenstein neither of which were even nominated for Best Picture!

By our standards today Cimarron is not a very good film. Both the acting and directing styles seem old fashioned even for the time it was made. Both the actors and the director were veterans of silent films and both the direction and acting seem to belong more to the silent era. Yet, Cimarron was a huge success with the critics of the time. Why? The critics of 1931 saw the film as an “epic” tale of the American West, (please make sure you look up the word “epic”). The critics were correct. Cimarron covers forty years of American history. However, the film actually begins with one of the key events that signaled the end of the Western Frontier, the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 which we saw in our first class last week. This was the last great act of land theft by the Whites against the Indians. So, we are beginning our study of the Western by looking at a film about the end of the old West. However, this is not unusual for Westerns. Many westerns are about the passing of that very brief era which, technically speaking, lasted just one full generation from 1865 to 1890.

By far the best part of the film is the re-creation of the actual land rush which we saw last week. The film recreates a moment in history when 50,000 people rushed to take control of 2,000,000 acres of land (roughly half the size of the island of Shikoku) in a single day. According to Wikipedia “Filming began in the summer of 1930 at Jasmin Quinn Ranch outside of Los Angeles, California, where the land rush scenes were shot. More than twenty-eight cameramen, and numerous camera assistants and photographers, were used to capture scenes of more than 5,000 costumed extras, covered wagons, buckboards, surreys, and bicyclists as they raced across grassy hills and prairie to stake their claim”. The land all these people are rushing to claim was, of course, land granted by treaty to The Indians forever.  But the U.S.A.  broke every treaty it ever signed with the Indians (that is a true historical fact). We will learn more about the Indians and what happened to them throughout this class. We will even take another look at Cimarron in the Fall semester to talk more about how the Indians are depicted.

The production of Cimarron had been so expensive, (the  budget was $1,433,000 ), that its profits at the box office, $1,383,000 , did not quite cover the costs. Financially this was a disaster for R.K.O. studios which had produced the film. In addition to an old fashioned style, the film has also been criticized for being overly long, dull and confusing.

However, Cimarron is not confusing in the next excerpt you are going to see. The hero, Yancey Cravat, enters a Saloon (bar) where the bartender knows him and invites him to have a drink.

In this excerpt the first thing the bartender says to Yancey is “still wearing that white hat” and he is obviously admiring Yancey’s hat. When Lon Yountis turns to speak to Yancey we see that he is wearing a black hat. That’s important.

One false note in this scene is that Yountis orders brandy. This film was made in 1931 and the “rules” about Western saloons had not yet been established in Hollywood. By the late 1930s nobody in a Western film ever ordered brandy. There were only two drinks ordered in Hollywood movie saloons by the late 1930s; whiskey or beer. However, Cimarron does show the proper way a  bartender served drinks. He puts the bottle down in front of the drinkers and lets them pour their own drinks. That was not a strict rule, but it was a custom. The drinker filled his shot glass to the top and the proper way to drink was to finish the shot in either one or two gulps before hitting the bar with the glass to show you were satisfied. The more satisfied you were, the harder you hit the bar. So there are lots of things to know about good and bad manners when you are in a Western saloon. Lon Yountis, obviously, shows very bad manners when he turns his back on Yancey Cravat not once but twice. These two are destined to have a confrontation and it happens the very next morning as Yancey walks with his wife down the street of the newly built and very lawless town of Osage. Lon Yountis, says “still wearing that white hat I see”.

That wasn’t hard was it? Obviously Yancey wins.

So, what did we learn from Cimarron today? When I was quite young, maybe six, my brother and I were watching a western and I was having trouble understanding it and kept asking “ne ne ne, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy?”. He kept telling me to shut up, but I kept asking until he finally said ‘white hat good, black hat bad’. It really is that simple in these movies sometimes. Of course the bad guy is also ugly in this film and the good guy is handsome. That was also often true, but not always. Something else we learn from this scene is that while the bad guy uses violence, so does the good guy. The bad guy tries to scare the good guy by shooting his hat off, but the good guy answers by shooting off part of the bad guy’s ear !This is called “upping the ante” (look this up) in the game of poker and it is also clearly an invitation to a shoot out …one the bad guy avoids by saying “if your wife weren’t here” … but we sense he knows he would lose.

In conclusion, by today’s standards Cimarron is not a great film and few people bother to watch it despite the fact it won the Oscar for best picture. However, only eight years later the first truly great Western would be released, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), a film that was not only tremendously entertaining, but one which for the first time in a Western offered audiences complex, interesting and fully drawn characters. in our next class we will begin our study of this great classic.