Pass the Popcorn: Movies from where I Sit

The other night we watched "Cimarron", the 1931 version.  As a kid I had to read several Edna Ferber books for school, and I remember this one and also "So Big".  She was quite the popular writer in midtwentieth century, though no one much reads her now, and I think she'd be catalogued more in the Young Adult section.  Both my husband and I love things about this old version, directed by Wesley Ruggles and staring Richard Dix as Yancey Cravat and Irene Dunne as his wife Sabra.  Estelle Taylor is the fallen woman, Dixie Lee, and Sol Levy plays the tinker turned apprentice in Yancey's newspaper office.  Edna May Oliver provides comedy as a prissy lady who befriends Sabra, and Eugene Jackson plays the black boy who worships Yancey and follows them from Kansas to Oklahoma.

This film is epic, covering about fifty years from the land rush and settling of Osage territory in Oklahoma through the build up and ultimate city that evolves, and how the town and people change in response.  Richard Dix is a hambone in the silent acting way, all over the place and over the top, but the other actors are pitch perfect.  Irene Dunne is a revelation as Sabra, who slowly realizes her husband will never grow up, and always be absent on adventures, so she takes over the publishing and by the end of the film is in Congress from her state.  Dunne was nominated for an Oscar for this role, where she must grow up and grow old and learn things the hard way.  So there is a lovely feminist message quite refreshing for the time, though in the nineteen thirties women were empowered by the vote and taking up reins in many fields.  There is also a note criticizing anti-semitism, with the character Levy plays and Yancey's championing of him against bullies.  And racism is confronted as well, both by the loving heroic Isaiah, and by the son of Yancey and Sabra, Cimarron, who falls in love with his childhood Indian friend and marries her when he grows up.  She is the daughter of a great Osage chief, and their children make the symbolic assimilation possible. 

But it is the awe inspiring scenes with hundreds of actors, racing to grab land in the rush, and the gradual transformation of the town are magnificent and stick in my mind.   No animated tricks here:  legions of horses, riders, wagons, buggies and other means of transportation were required to shoot these scenes.  I said to my husband that it's certain people and animals died making this epic.  The scenes feel real in a way that modern technology cannot match.  Imagine Gary Cooper as Yancey or Cary Grant, and the movie would really be amazing.  As it is, it's well worth watching.