Described as being, "Terrific As All Creation", Cimarron is a decidedly slight movie important only for having won the 4th Academy Award and not for any staying power across the passage of decades. Almost unwatchable save for its sweeping vistas and sets designed to remember the settling of the Old West, the movie's empire building back story would have been better served had the filmmakers made a decision to more radically alter their product from its source material.

Based as it is on Edna Ferber's best-selling novel of the same name the film is closely associated with her romantic vision of masculine heroism and the conflict between individual conquest and advancing civilization. Director Wesley Ruggles's film realistically conveys this pioneer landscape of late nineteenth century Oklahoma yet it also lacks the nuance of an interesting plot.

Partly this unevenness stems from the film's mixed performances consisting of memorable supporting actors and oddly ineffective leads. It also stems from confusion in the film's themes about the social issues of the day along with the structure of its narrative stretching over 40 years from 1889-1930.

By seizing the literary pedigree of a much beloved source and then blowing out that source's narrative to showcase movie-specific production design and photographic excellence, the film emphasizes spectacle over refinement at every turn. This tendency is evident today among box office leaders and laggards alike and while it's too much to suppose Cimarron started the practice in popular movies, it's no less an example of the tendency.

Centered on the leading figure of Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), a frontier lawyer, sheriff, newspaper editor and proprietor, father, husband, spiritualist, civil rights agitator, and inchoate politician, the movie takes shape when he moves his family to the Oklahoma territory after 1889's historical land rush. This opening sequence, one of the film's few truly terrific moments, establishes Yancey's romance with adventure and positions him among western characters now familiar to us from years of repetition in movie serials, TV shows and legions of subsequent films.

Yancey's wife, Sabra (Irene Dunne), a society woman, finds herself in a coarse world with young children to care for. At first hopelessly devoted to her wandering and devoted husband, it is her subordinate story that becomes more interesting as the movie unravels. Because Yancey is simultaneously capable of action and refinement despite the inconsistency of these qualities in light of his wanderlust and general irresponsibility, Sabra's journey towards independence is a more useful model in the film.

This conflict between Yancey and Sabra is reflected throughout the film in his concern for Native Americans that he properly recognizes as having been robbed through western expansion. Making Sabra wholly unsympathetic to such sentiment, however, the film sanctifies Yancey through his sense of social justice but also undercuts him with his periodic adventures. It goes without saying his moral purpose is missing in the film's other characters so his absence from the screen empties the movie of heart.

Just as these various adventures include a second land rush, participation in the Spanish-American war and otherwise growing older as an Oklahoman legend, they serve to advance the plot across 40 years on-screen. Viewing this 40-year period through the Cravat's hometown of Osage, Oklahoma, their covered wagon settlement becomes a bursting metropolis, all at the price of the wild, untamed, "Cimarron" world. Despite Yancey's shiftless hero and Sabra's eventual ascendance to Congress he is the one who recognizes evil and saves Osage time and time again before finally sacrificing himself in an oil field to save a group of miners that ends the movie.

While Cimarron's ad campaign proclaimed the picture as, "Earth-shaking in its grandeur! A titanic canvas sprung to life!" it's truly hard to believe how such hyperbole could have been meant seriously when given the results. Winning the Outstanding Production top honors at the 1932 Academy Awards ceremony Cimarron beat out East Lynne and Skippy along with the first screen version of The Front Page and the most well remembered non-winner of the year, Trader Horn. Among other films not recognized by the Academy are such classics as City Lights, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and The Blue Angel and in there absence from competition is brought to question the Academy's motives and voting practice for the picture of the year honors for 1930-1931.

Not only is Cimarron laughable, it's confusing about the central themes of social progress and it's hopelessly devoted to silent film forms and conventions. Dix's acting is a mixed bag of overlarge gesture and silliness. Vignettes depicting different years from 1889-1930 vary in quality. Howard Estabrook's Academy Award winning script preaches to beatify Yancey, always at the expense of other characters in the film. Black servant boy, Isaiah (Eugene Jackson), is an unnerving glimpse of the '30s Stepin Fetchit stereotype and the presentation of Native Americans is, at best, marginal to screen action despite Yancey's periodic speeches and, at worst, historically revisionist.

In the end, Cimarron is a museum piece in the most pejorative sense of the term. It is unqualified as bedrock of our cinema history and deserves our respect and attention. That it is also fails to speak through the years to enrich our current circumstance means it's a film for archivists and not film enthusiasts.