Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

gavin6942 A newspaper editor settles in an Oklahoma boom town with his reluctant wife at the end of the nineteenth century.This film is something of an anomaly. Starting from an Edna Ferber novel, it was made into a western epic and was highly praised. The film received a ton of Oscar nominations, and even won Best Picture. The last western to do so until 1990's "Dances With Wolves" sixty years later. You would think it would be a massively powerful film.And yet, it has fallen hard. As of 2015, it is the lowest rated Best Picture on IMDb, with only a 6.0 rating. The rating is fair, but it means either this is the worst Best Picture ever made, or it was up against even worse films, or something...Not helping matters is the film's apparent rarity. It saw DVD release about a decade later than it should have, and as of 2015 still does not exist on Blu-ray. Nothing can be done for the story and acting, but it looks like the picture could be cleaned up some.

The_Film_Cricket Edna Ferber had a talent for writing stories painted on an epic frontier canvas while leaving enough room to allow us to get the intimate details of her characters. She was a proponent of the little man; most often her work featured a female protagonist who was more than just a tool to be tugged around by a heroic man. She always left room in her stories for a rich gallery of supporting players, often minorities.Where this passion comes from can only be speculated. Perhaps it was from her upbringing as the daughter of a Jewish Hungarian immigrant. Perhaps it was growing into womanhood at the end of the 19th century when the social rules for women were no better than a lace-covered version of slavery. Her work could be seen as an escape. What you got from her writing was the American frontier, especially in her best known work "Giant", which became a film by George Stevens in 1952. Her other best-known work is Cimarron, another portrait of a family living on the desolate American frontier, only this time the film adaptation didn't work.Wesley Ruggles' adaptation of Cimarron is a long-winded barnacle, a movie that would like to be an epic on par with The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance or Greed, but comes off as creaky, dated and dull. One must admire its scope, but there's nothing real to it. The acting is wooden, the movie is too long, and the racial stereotypes are appalling.The story beings just before the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush, when would-be settlers headed to Oklahoma to be part of a land rush after The Harrison Administration deemed the Oklahoma territory to be opened for new settlement. Among the hopefuls are Yancey Cavat (Richard Dix) and his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne). Yancey has itchy feet and has moved his family from Wichita to be part of the event. The plot of land that the Cavat's lay claim to eventually becomes the boom town of Osage and Yancey becomes its prominent leader.Soon the town is settling in, and Yancey finds himself getting itchy feet once again. He leaves the family behind, leaving Sabra to fend for herself. Eventually, he is gone for so long that she has to make her own way. If this story sounds boring to you, then you can imagine how dull it plays out on the screen. The performance by Richard Dix is flavorless, although Irene Dunne (one of my favorite actors) allows a bit more humanity. Not much, though, she doesn't have much to work with.The only interest here is really is how big the whole thing is. This was a movie made at the beginning of the depression and, despite this; RKO spent an astronomical $1 million to make it. Hundreds of extras were employed for the giant land rush that opens the film, lauded at the time, today it just seems like a lot of horses and wagons running across the landscape. No real interest there.It might be reasonable to forgive the film for racial stereotyping given the climate of the times. They were commonplace in the 20s and 30s. The movie purports to be on the side of the Native American but, despite the fact that Yancey defends their rights, there are no Native Americans in this film with any specific speaking roles.The portrait of African-Americans is more visible but no less appalling. The only central black character is a young black kid named Isaiah (Eugene Jackson) who stows away in a rug when Yancey and Sabra head out across the prairie. He is purely comedy relief, existing on the edges of the film as a bug-eye simpleton. Jackson had a long, enduring career in show business beginning on the vaudeville circuit, beginning in film in Hal Roach's "Our Gang" serials and ending as a dance instructor. His career is much better and much for fulfilling than anything he was given here.It isn't just the racial stereotypes that pull the movie down, it is the whole enterprise. Other epics have come along that make this one look creaky and dated. It is interesting how the movie flows from the land rush up through the economic boom of the late 1920s, but it is sheer torture getting there. There's nothing of interest to carry us along and no one to care about. If you want to get involved in Ferber's work, curl up with one of her books, and then rent "Giant." Leave this one to rot, as it has in the annals of time.

carleeee The historical but fictional film, based on the book by Edna Ferber, presents us with a clash of cultures and attitudes. Yancey is a restless jack-of-all-trades: the new town's newspaper editor, a lawyer, fast-shooting law enforcer and even a preacher. Wanderlust gets the better of him, leaving his wife Sabra (Irene Dunn) to raise the family and run the newspaper.Mostly set in the fictional 'Boom Town' of Osage, not to be confused with today's Osage in Oklahoma which is tiny, we see the townsfolk making do with what they have. Yancey is mainly the Editor of The Oklahoma Wigwam but at the same time he gets to use his shooting skills, act as a lawyer, and run the first church service.The issue I had with Cimarron was that the storyline was disjointed and lost focus at times. Overall it was about the birth of a new state, though it went in different directions at different times and many sub-plots were never fully-explained. Sabra's character grew into a wise and admirable older woman, however we missed out on seeing her character actually develop. A woman in a more modern film would not have shown so much loyalty to her husband...her loyalty is to be admired even if her husband needs a clip round the ears!On a technical note, the characters didn't always age in sync with one another. By the end of the film Sabra has aged (at least in the hair department), but not nearly as much as Yancey. Her complexion remained unrealistically youthful for a woman over 60, though her vocals were always spot-on to whichever age she was playing which is no mean feat for an actor.The acting overall was convincing, special mention to Estelle Taylor as town prostitute Dixie Lee for her moving life story showing there is more than meets the eye when it comes to judging someone, though the town gossip Mrs Tracy Wyatt was a bit over-played by Edna May Oliver. Tracey's mannerisms and loud outfits give the impression of a cross-breed of Hyacinth Bucket and Madame Thenardier. Some minor story lines could have been cut to speed things up where it was needed, but overall Cimarron is a great example of 1930s film, and gives a good grasp of the lives of pioneers in the late 19th Century.

Forn55 In a year that saw the release of "City Lights," "Little Caesar," and "The Blue Angel," "Cimarron" was surely the oddest choice to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but win it did, although the award failed to translate into big bucks at the box office. At over two hours, the movie is both long (for its era) and strangely sluggish given its action-packed western setting. Adapted from the novel by Edna Ferber, "Cimarron" is interesting primarily for the celluloid collision of two schools of cinematic acting. The first, exemplified by Richard Dix playing two-fisted, editor-pioneer Yancey Cravat, is the school of silent-film histrionics; the second, is the more naturalistic school of screen acting which found in Irene Dunne (playing Dix's loyal wife, Sabra) one of its more sensitive and enduring interpreters. The two styles don't mix well. Dix is all ham and bluster; shaking his fists, gesturing like a road-company actor playing Julius Caesar, casting his eyes up to heaven and ringing the bells loudly on every emotional change his character undergoes. Dunne, by contrast, engages in a quieter duet with the camera; one that allows her character to develop slowly over the course of the movie. The disparity between the two styles is unsettling; the viewer is left with the impression of having seen the same movie through two different sets of lenses. The fact that "Cimarron" is both incredibly dated and blatantly racist doesn't help much, either.All that said, however, the movie's still worth watching, if only as an example of an early Hollywood blockbuster epic. The opening "land rush" sequence (with a cast of thousands) is compelling and cinematically sophisticated, even by today's standards. And there are several worthwhile cameo turns including one by Edna May Oliver, who manages to steal every scene she's in.