Wednesday Western: 'Cimarron' (1960)

Highbrow

Edna Ferber’s novel "Cimarron" was published in 1930 as America sank lower into the Great Depression.

"Cimarron" is high-brow art, with Pulitzer Prize-winning Ferber offering gorgeous, if not overwrought sentences like: “Lean hounds drowsed in the sun-drenched untidiness of the doorway, and that untidiness was hidden and transformed by a miracle of color and scent and bloom.”

The nobodies of the world love tradition, while the cultural elites need constant renewal, even to the point of destruction.

A year after the book’s release, RKO Radio Pictures Inc. purchased the rights to "Cimarron" and threw big money into the project.

It's reception evinces a Hollywood paradox: The movie lost money and the general public didn’t care for it, but it was a hit among critics and industry elites. Despite being unpopular with audiences, "Cimarron" was also the first film to earn Academy Award nominations for each of the five big categories.

It also became the first Western to win the Oscar for Best Picture, one of only four to have done so, none of which were made by John Ford. It would be another 60 years before another Western, "Dances with Wolves," earned the top prize

A decade later, MGM bought the film rights from RKO.

The studio spent another 10 years trying to bring it to life, at one point casting Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor as Yancey and Sabra, the husband and wife at the heart of "Cimarron."

They eventually landed on Glenn Ford, a kind of victory lap after his performance in "3:10 to Yuma" (1957).

The two-decade delay placed the remake in 1960, for better or worse because 1960 was a teenager year for the Western movie genre: hints of rebellion, annoyance with the status quo, eagerness to impose its youth.

We were closer to movies like Sam Peckinpah’s "The Deadly Companions" (1961) and John Ford’s "How the West Was Won" (1962) and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962) than we were to Ford’s "Stagecoach" (1939) or Delmer Daves’ "Broken Arrow" (1950).

The Civil Rights movement offered a new chance for Ferber’s humane messaging to resonate.

Where you can find it

Amazon Prime - $3.99 to rent

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YouTube - $3.99 to rent

Google Play - $3.99 to rent

My Mann, Anthony

"Cimarron" is an unusual choice as my first Anthony Mann Western. There’s disagreement about whether or not "Cimarron" even classifies as a Western. The sophistication of Ferber's work makes it deeply literary, like a slow-moving stage play. Chronologically, it extends past the cut-off for Westerns into a world with cars.

Its tone is markedly feminine, emphasizing relationships and anxieties in a way that’s foreign to the genre.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a remarkable, stunning film, one well worth your time. But it’s also a bit of a slog.

He was in the final third of his illustrious three-decade career. By then, he’d already built, and burned, multiple bridges, including the one joining him and Jimmy Stewart in friendship and artistic collaboration

He had cut his teeth making lean, low-budget B-films through the 1940s — the kind of gangster movies and cop dramas that established film noir as a revolutionary moment in cinema history. He built momentum into the 1950s with masterpieces like "The Furies" (1950) and "Winchester ‘73" (1950) — every single movie referenced here will get an entry soon enough.

During this phrase, he caught his stride with Westerns, beginning with the Stewart collaborations "Bend of the River" (1952), "The Naked Spur" (1953), "The Far Country" (1954), and "The Man from Laramie" (1955), which was to be the last time the duo worked together.

He closed the decade with "The Tin Star" (1957), starring Henry Fonda, followed by "Man of the West" (1958), the Gary Cooper gem that critics hated until the Europeans began to praise it.

Next, MGM enlisted Mann for a trio of epic films. The latter two were "El Cid" (1961), which features Charlton Heston as an 11th century warlord with Sophia Lauren at his side, and "The Fall of the Roman Empire" (1964), which also stars Lauren.

The first was "Cimarron." The remake. MGM would throw even more money at the project than RKO had, shelling out for a thousand extras, 700 horses, and 500 wagons. More cameras. More fire. More explosions. More gunfire. More spectacle. Make it electric with Metrocolor, open the screen with Cinescope.

They wanted big. Maximalist. Epic.

Boomer Sooners

In the foreword to "Cimarron," Edna Ferber writes that “only the more fantastic and improbable events contained in this book are true,” adding that “there is no attempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma.”

She charts some of the research methods she used and reveals the balance of truth and fiction at work before returning to the openness of the territory she captures. “Anything can happen in Oklahoma,” she concludes. “Practically everything has.”

"Cimarron," both the book and the films, is special to me in part because I’m an Okie, and I grew up learning about the events she dramatizes.

The passage of the Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 opened up Indian territory to settlers. The subsequent feverish dash for land characterized the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, the first of seven homesteading races across wild territory, as 50,000 maniacs fought for each leap toward their stake of untouched land.

They rushed however they could: unicycles, wagons, carriages, stagecoaches, ponies, mules.

Two million acres of verdant land were up for grabs on the promise that the settlers would improve the territory they claimed.

As we see in "Cimarron," this deal fell apart when all those rowdy adventurers wound up in the same makeshift towns.

Revolver-wielding brutes spilled out of the saloons, itching for someone to shoot. It’s a familiar human outcome, this teenage habit of going overboard with freedom.

Then, there’s the next stage: darkness. Outbursts, violence, even lynchings, the the most cowardly type of murder, which masquerade as last-ditch justice.

The shadow

In the realm of the Western, such evildoings rarely go unavenged. The hero often appears no different from the deviants, capable of all the same tricks and gunplay, as quick and ruthless in combative endurance.

There are a million variations of this shadowy hero, one of the most prominent figures throughout the Western genre — from the earliest silent movies right up to contemporary films. Typically, this man, or woman, has a checkered past that they’re careful to hide.

They belong to a story that you can’t drag out of them. Often, they’re hiding from fame, or infamy. But this effort inevitably fails, usually when they cross paths with old acquaintances who force them into combat.

This wandering, mysterious redeemer almost always witnesses the injustice of a new world and resolves to do something about it, which is never as easy as it sounds, and never as bloodless.

Yancey Cravat’s golden voice

In "Cimarron," this shadowy figure is hypnotic and peculiar, at odds with the status quo. His name is Yancey Cravat, although townsfolk suspect it's an alias. In the 1960 remake, Yancey is played by Glenn Ford.

Sabra is played by Maria Schell with her beautiful Austrian purr.

A hulking man with a surprising bounce of grace and ease, Yancey is possibly the greatest criminal lawyer of his day, “a bizarre, glamourous, and slightly mythical figure,” who entranced Sabra Venable, prized daughter of Felice Venable, with the musicality of his voice and the mysterious reach of his warmth and the hypnotic dance of his slim, pliant hands.

An actor; a fanatic; a charlatan with eyes that are “a deep and unfathomable gray,” Yancey rattles off passages from Shakespeare, the Bible, and "The Odyssey."

His origins are unknown, but it appears that he came from Texas and Cimarron — his son’s name is “Cim.” Rumors and gossip did the rest of the work, with whispers that Yancey had Indian lineage, that his real name was in fact Cimarron, a Spanish word meaning “wild or unruly.”

He wooed Sabra right into marriage.

Ferber uses her feminine tone to describe Sabra: “Twenty-one now, married at 16, mother of a four-year-old boy, and still in love with her picturesque giant of a husband, there was about Sabra Cravat a bloom, a glow, something seen at that exquisite and transitory time in a woman’s life when her chemical, emotional, and physical make-up attains its highest point and fuses.”

Like Ferber’s novel, "Cimarron" starts as an ornamental film, an escapade of high society. We begin deep within the civilized boredom of Kansas City.

The characters are extravagant, bold, eloquent, sophisticated. They might as well be ancient gods, empty figurations of pure status.

In the novel, Ferber tells us that, while the Venables transplanted from Mississippi to Kansas two decades earlier, “the mid-west had failed to set her bourgeois stamp upon them.”

Yancey convinces Sabra to leave her station among the gentry of the South so that they can chase the dream of wide-open land, the prospect of a new kingdom.

Before long, the hedges and exclusivity will vanish underneath a stampede.

Bare life

Separated from her well-to-do family, all puffy with the elaborate clothing of the upper class, Sabra is reduced to bare life. Our one-time daughter of privilege finds herself shivering in fear, clinging naked to the ridge of a pond as hyena teenagers heckle her, only for her husband, Yancey, to side with these rapacious losers.

“How do you know these drunk pests?”

This is Sabra’s first glimpse at the hidden machinery of Yancey Cravat. The farther they get into the territory, the wilder he gets. He fights bare-fisted when the situation calls to the crowd for a real man. He howls, he smiles differently than Sabra has ever seen.

All the prostitutes know him, the entire wagon of singing whores.

With each new revelation, Sabra learns both more but knows less, fetching the truth from the man she loves without destroying his enigmatic prowess.

Will he keep getting wilder? Can he ever be tamed?

This lingering pursuit follows Sabra over the years, offering a view of the institution of the family.

A sprawling cast

Russ Tamblyn shines as the Cherokee Kid. Who could have guessed that he would eventually become father-in-law to one of the most iconic comedians of the last 20 years, David Cross, as seen in "Mr. Show," "Arrested Development," and "Scary Movie 2."

Vic Morrow makes an appearance — two decades later, while filming a wartime scene for "Twilight Zone: The Movie," a helicopter hovering overhead spiraled, killing Morrow and two child actors with him.

There’s Harry Morgan, who charted out a career over the course of nearly 70 years with beloved roles in "Dragnet" and "M*A*S*H."

There’s William Edgar Buchanan II, who played Uncle Joe Carson in "The Beverly Hillbillies." And just like the Beverly Hillbillies, the Okies in Cimarron struck oil.

Glenn and Maria

Behind the scenes, there was a different kind of land-grab taking place between the two lead actors, Maria Schell and Glenn Ford.

At the time, Maria Schell was married to German actor/director Horst Hächler. The couple traveled from Austria only to discover that she’d been largely edited out of the film.

Glenn Ford was married to actress and dancer Eleanor Powell. Ford was a notorious womanizer, a compulsive cheater.

Ford and Schell snuck into an intense affair. You can tell throughout the movie.

By the time of the premiere, however, this relationship had changed. Anne Baxter, who played Dixie Lee, described their dramatic fallout in her autobiography: "Ice had formed between Glenn Ford and Maria Schell for ugly private reasons, which didn't help. During shooting, they'd scrambled together like eggs. I understood she'd even begun divorce proceedings in Germany. It was obviously premature of her. Now, he scarcely glanced or spoke in her direction, and she looked as if she were in shock."

Light breaks shadow

Yancey’s knack for retribution is markedly political. This political element is always interesting, and buoyant, with Westerns.

In this case, the cast members were evenly spread throughout the political compass.

Glenn Ford was a JFK Democrat at the time but would turn Republican with Reagan. L.Q. Jones was Republican, Methodist. Mary Wickes, an outspoken Republican. And the beautiful and gifted Anne Baxter, an enthusiastic Republican, was the granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mercedes McCambridge, who voiced the demon in "The Exorcist," was a loud-and-proud liberal. Aline MacMahon had been blacklisted for having communist associations and spent much of the rest of her life being monitored by the FBI. And, perhaps most of all, Edna Ferber, the woman who wrote the story, was a liberal with a stir for revision.

Ferber, who was Jewish, visited Europe throughout the 1920s and 1930s. She witnessed the rise of Nazism: “It was a fearful thing to see a continent – a civilization – crumbling before one's eyes. It was a rapid and seemingly inevitable process to which no one paid any particular attention."

This explains her fascination with the idealism of homesteaders, who are often reckless, and her interest in the institution of the family, even though Ferber herself never got married or had children and is rumored to have been a lesbian.

Does that make "Cimarron" an anti-Western? Because this distinction — between true-hearted Westerns and cynical Trojan Horses — is one of the clearest divisions among people who love Western art and film.

This dynamic is similar to the Hollywood paradox we discussed above: The nobodies of the world love tradition while the cultural elites need constant renewal, even to the point of destruction.

Because what are we really talking about when we attach terms like “anti-Western” to revolution-minded cultural movements?

What claim do liberals have to a rare genre in which the general sentiment is conservative? It is conservative, right? Why else would the elitists who host the "Why Theory" podcast whine about how Westerns are “very problematic”? (We’ll get back to this idiotic notion in due time.)

Sure, plenty of liberals enjoy Westerns, but why?

These days, the liberal touch extends to every aspect of culture, with very few exceptions — "The Chosen," "Yellowstone," Mel Gibson. The loud and proud Hollywood conservative is gone. This has driven us into art that is lopsided, with no rest from the revolution and nobody to say, “Please, stop.”

So, one of the questions I’m interested in with Wednesday Western, is “Why did American culture lose its political symmetry?”

It’s certainly relevant to our pursuit: John Wayne and Walt Disney and Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper and a dozen other A-list actors had communists on their heels in Hollywood, with the House Un-American Activities Committee tucked into their holster. Unlike today’s Hollywood conservatives, they were unflinchingly outspoken.

Who’s laughing now?

My main complaint is that "Cimarron" is humorless. This says a lot about Westerns as an art form, which is nuanced enough to lace comedy into its grand narrative.

I don’t know whether there’s a single humorous moment in "Cimarron." In the only scene with laughter, it’s used to indicate that the postpartum mother has lost her mind.

This lack of a comedic undercurrent is strange for Anthony Mann, who specializes in revealing emotions and impulses at their most raw.

My suspicion is that the movie’s staid tone comes from Edna Ferber, who seems far more concerned in promoting social change than letting her audience bask in the breeze of enjoyment. A serious pursuit that demands everything from its host.

This activist’s zeal is no laughing matter!

Ride lonesome

Underneath all of it, however, Anthony Mann was struggling, dissatisfied. When filming began, producer Edmund Grainger, an industry pro near the end of his career, forced Mann to film indoors. He wasn’t stingy about it: The entire city of Osage sprawled across 11 acres of land, over three sound stages, creating in the largest town set for a Western ever constructed by MGM.

But landscapes and endless skies are fundamental to an Anthony Mann Western. How much compromise is too much? He was a restless man, perfectly willing to throw his hands up and leave if he felt he was being micromanaged.

Which is what he did.

The studio replaced him with an uncredited director. The final cut of "Cimarron" was a mess. Nearly two-and-a-half hours in length, it met the baseline qualifications for an Epic Western without actually being one.

It all felt so ornamental.

The film premiered in Oklahoma City on December 1, 1960, without much pageantry. It bombed among both critics and audiences, losing $3.6 million at the box office.

The worst repudiation, though, came from Edna Ferber in letter to the New York Times:

I received from this second picture of my novel not one single penny in payment. I can't even do anything to stop the motion-picture company from using my name in advertising so slanted that it gives the effect of my having written the picture ... I shan't go into the anachronisms in dialogue; the selection of a foreign-born actress ... to play the part of an American-born bride; the repetition; the bewildering lack of sequence ... I did see 'Cimarron' ... four weeks ago. This old gray head turned almost black during those two (or was it three?) hours.

Anthony Mann never made another Western. Like so many of the characters he brought to life, he just vanished into the horizon.

As Roy Rogers loved to say, “Goodbye, good luck, and may the good Lord take a liking to you. See ya next week.”