Cimarron

“Sometimes the given name of an American movie is less instructive than its French title. Cimarron, in 1960 the last Western ever made by Anthony Mann, one of the genre’s masters, is known in France as La Ruée vers l’Ouest: The Rush Towards the West. Of course, it had to be Cimarron here, to honor the 1930 original (starring Richard Dix) as well as the Edna Ferber novel. But Mann’s Cimarron is about a man who is happiest when leading a rush, and never convinced that the rush has reached its true and lasting destination. “Early on in the picture there is the historically accurate and cinematically phenomenal land-rush scene as the rolling, bare plains of Oklahoma become the site of a race for every imaginable horse-drawn transport. At the head of the race is Yancey Cravat, an adventurer with a conscience, but a wanderer too who will move on to Alaska and Cuba, leaving the new society to be built up by his wife, who takes over his job of newspaper proprietor. In showing the growth of Western community—the building and the organizing—Cimarron depicts the active hero as a chronic escapist, doomed to exist in the warm light of story-telling, never quite settled. And as it comes from Edna Ferber, so Cimarron teaches us that Giant was a Western too, a Western about a woman who began the domestication of the range so that it would be ready for Dallas and The Yellow Rose.” David Thomson —BAM/PFA