Best Picture Update - Cimarron

The other night I watched the next Best Picture winner on my Netflix list.

Cimarron
1931
Starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne

This was the first Western to win Best Picture, and I guess I can see why. It tells the sweeping tale of a man, Yancey Cravat, on the search for adventure, who moves his wife and toddler son to the Oklahoma territory, looking to put his mark on this developing part of the country. When they arrive in Osage, his wife, played by Irene Dunne, is overwhelmed, and wants to move back to Kansas. But they stay, and they settle down, and he starts a newspaper. He settles into life as a prominent figure in the town, as his wife starts to get involved in the area through women's groups, while raising their son and a daughter who comes along a year after they move to Osage. After four years in town, life has become a little too routine for adventure seeker Yancey, and he leaves his wife and kids at home and goes off for new adventures in an area of land that the government is just opening for settlement. She does just fine without him, running the paper and raising their kids. He does eventually come back, and she takes him back for some reason I couldn't quite figure out, but he is nothing if not predictable, and soon takes off again. She ends up living most of her married life alone. Ironically, she ends up being the most influential of the two, and actually ends up as the first female Congress person at the end of the movie (I think it was Congress - it's been a few days since I watched it, and now I'm doubting myself on that). She never gave up on loving Yancey, though, and in fact kept his name on the masthead of the paper as the editor for the whole 40 year span of the movie.

And see, here is where my problem with this movie comes in. Despite the fact that I agree with Yancey's views on civil rights - he was an advocate of giving Native Americans the vote and treting them the same as anyone else (and yet he ignored the black boy living with them calling him "Massa" (Master, with the stereotypical accent of the time), and working for them much as he would have in slave times, which had only ended about 20 years before this movie takes place) - I didn't like Yancey Cravat at all.

I don't know if it's the way he was written, or the way Richard Dix played him, but I hated him from the moment I first saw him, and that never changed. It makes it really hard to like a movie, when you hate one of the main characters. I'm not even really sure what it was about him that I hated. It could be his arrogance, his disregard for his family (anyone who cared about his family wouldn't leave them for five years at a time, especially in the 1880s and 1890s, when he couldn't exactly pick up a cell phone and call every day). Oh, it could also be the fact that he seemed to become a self-appointed judge and jury for Osage, killing a man who he suspected of murdering the last person who had tried to run a paper in the new town, without benefit of any real proof (he was even shown carving notches into his gun barrel at one point). Or it could be all of these things together. But really, it was just a gut reaction. He wasn't to be trusted, even if he was the "hero" of the movie. (That's in quotes because I think he was really the furthest thing from a hero.)

Anyway, it was worth watching, and like I said, I can see why it won the Oscar in 1931. It just wasn't for me.

Next up on my Oscar list is a movie from 1932 called Grand Hotel, with Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford. Here's hoping I like it better.

Oh, and I should institute some sort of rating system for these movies, don't you think? I'll do a 1-5 star rating, with 1 being I hated it, and 5 being I loved it and want to own it.

Cimarron gets 2 1/2 stars from me. I liked Irene Dunne, hated Richard Dix (or his character, anyway), and I don't really like Westerns to begin with.