Cimarron (M-G-M), a remake of the 1931 western based on Edna Ferber's bestselling novel about the opening of Oklahoma, might more suitably have been called Cimarron-and-on-and-on-and-on. It lasts 2 hours and 27 minutes, and for at least half of that time most spectators will probably be Oklacomatose.
This effect was apparently not easy to achieve. Cimarron took 15 weeks to film, cost $6,000,000, involved six name performers (Glenn Ford, Maria Schell, Anne Baxter, Arthur O'Connell, Russ Tamblyn, Mercedes McCambridge), 360 bit-players, 700 extras, 700 horses, 500 assorted gigs, carts, buggies, stagecoaches and prairie schooners, plus a bicycle built for three.
The show gets going with a whoop and a holler in 1889 as the Oklahoma Line caves in like an invisible levee and a Metrocolored flood of horses and humans pours across the widescreen to the promised landgrab. Sad to say, when the flood is past there is nothing left but dribs and drabs of scenes and themes.
There is a love story, but in less than an hour it peters out in commonplace quarrels. There is also the story of Oklahoma, but in little more than an hour it gets lost in a forest of oil wells. Then there is the theme of race prejudice, but that continually dissolves in sanctimonious absurdity—as when a Jew, forced by a target-happy gunman to hold two whisky bottles with outstretched arms, lifts his eyes to heaven in a shockingly tasteless travesty of the Crucifixion.
Finally, there is the main theme of the picture: the struggle between the wild, free spirit (Hero Ford) of the vanishing frontier and the money-grubbing mood (Heroine Schell) of the Main Street that replaced it. This struggle is hopelessly perplexed by Scriptwriter Arnold Schulman, who begins by deriding his heroine as a hysterical, success-obsessed, man-riding witch, a walking abstract of the worst in U.S. women, and then abruptly, without transition or transformation, ends by adoring her as the archetype of the pioneer mother, the thin-lipped, raw-knuckled goddess of self-sacrifice who made America what it is today.
What is Scriptwriter Schulman trying to say? That those brave, noble, hardworking frontier women of song and story were really a flock of harpies? Probably not. But Actor Ford, a soft-voiced fellow with a mothers-boyish grin, consistently alters Author Ferber's "bizarre, glamorous, gigantic" Yancey Cravat into just the sort of curly-haired doormat women love to wipe their feet on. And the harpy is hideously (though perhaps unintentionally) well played by Actress Schell, whose nervous, incessant, sugar-coated smile suggests that somewhere inside, there is a very bitter pill.