Cimarron

Anthony Mann
1960

I did myself the disservice of watching this sweeping Technicolor 'n Cinemascope epic on a pan and scan VHS tape that I bought unopened on the street for $3. I'm usually a sucker for Glenn Ford and Anthony Mann is my second all time favorite director of Westerns so I was a bit disappointed to find that this Edna Ferber adaptation is certainly the weakest of all the Mann westerns I've seen to date. The picture takes on the settling of Oklahoma from the initial mad dash for farmland to the discovery of oil riches as seen through the eyes of one dysfunctional family. Mann's sticky moral conundrums and unromantic take on the West are mostly muted here, though some complexity comes through in the overt racism towards the Indian and Jewish settlers (some of which is perpetrated by Ford's wife Maria Schell), and the decision of the film's couple to stay together for the sake of their child despite their obvious incompatibility. At it's most irritating the film is a fist in the face of feminism with it's understandable, but perennially unlikable matriarch. Her obsession with material comfort and financial stability for her son is always presented in thorny opposition to the altruisitc flights of fancy and romantic goose chases of her charismatic husband. If this is one of Mann's weaker efforts it's only because his hallmark style doesn't come through as strongly. Overall the picture is a solid, if unspectacular, western imbued with Ferber's predilection for long-winded storytelling.