: Cimarron :
Cimarron, based on Edna Ferber’s book, is a strange combination of a badly dated film with overt racism that scratches badly at modern sentiments with epic storytelling that isn’t all bad in places.
It’s the story of the Yancey and Sabra Cravat family and their (fictional) role in the “settling” of Oklahoma. Right now I’m reading the book 1491 about the history of native peoples in the Americas so it’s hard not to throw proverbial stones at the land-grab scenes where thousands of white settlers pour onto native lands with the full faith and backing of the U.S. government to plant little flags and stake their claims.
Yancey is an adventurer who cannot settle down, a newspaper man, and our resident “good guy with a gun.” There’s one scene where he is literally giving a sermon with two guns on his hips. He takes them out of their holsters after announcing the collection he’s taken up to raise money for the church organ, and, over the heads of the townspeople of Osage, Oklahoma, kills the resident “bad guy with a gun” at the back of the tent. The church service continues from there with everyone settling right back down in their seats as if nothing had happened. With all of the gun violence in America right now I found that scene particularly disturbing.
We’re given some pretty clear outlines about who it’s OK to be prejudiced against in this film. African-Americans are loyal servants often the butt of jokes. Jews are good people and only prejudiced people don’t realize this. Indians rise in the estimation of the Cravat family but only after their land has been taken and their way of life in Oklahoma has been destroyed.
Women in general are a little more complicated. Sabra, the female lead, has her backward moments but ends up as a congresswoman in 1930 Oklahoma, running the paper her husband started 40 years earlier, and rearing their children alone after he abandons her due to his never-ending wanderlust.
Cimarron is another Academy Award winner that has not stood the test of time well. Tastes change and there’s just too much that’s too objectionable in this film to appeal to modern audiences. It doesn’t help that the ending is abrupt.
Filmsite.org reports the following about Cimarron:
The first western film to win Best Picture; it wouldn’t be until 1990 when the next western film would win Best Picture (Dances With Wolves (1990))
The only film in Oscar history to be nominated in every possible category
The first film to receive more than 6 Academy Award nominations
The first film to receive Big Five nominations (‘Best Picture,’ Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Writing (Adaptation)), in other words, the first film to be nominated for every major Academy Award, including Best Picture
: City Lights :
City Lights, a Charlie Chaplin silent film, was not nominated for an Academy Awards but filmsite.org reports it should have won and indeed it seems to have stood the test of time better than Cimarron.
I’m not a Charlie Chaplin fan. Neither slapstick in general nor the silent film art does much for me, so I’ll let someone else write this review because honestly I wasn’t a fan of this onr. Wikipedia reports:
City Lights was immediately successful upon release on January 30, 1931, with positive reviews and box office receipts of $5 million. Today, critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin’s career, but one of the greatest films ever made. In 1992, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. In 2007, the American Film Institute’s 100 Years… 100 Movies ranked City Lights as the 11th greatest American film of all time. In 1949, the critic James Agee referred to the final scene in the film as the “greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid”.
Plum Librarian LLC 