Cimarron (1960)

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Movie
German title Cimarron
Original title Cimarron
Cimarron1960.jpg
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1960
length 136 (Germany), 147 (original) minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Anthony Mann
script Arnold Schulman
production Edmund Grainger
music Franz Waxman
camera Robert Surtees
cut John D. Dunning
occupation

Cimarron is an epic, 25-year American pioneering and monumental film from 1960 by Anthony Mann with Glenn Ford and Maria Schell in the lead roles. The story is based on the novel of the same name (1929) by Edna Ferber , which was first made into a film in 1930 and ran in Germany under the title Pioneers of the Wild West .

action

The United States in April 1889. The last remaining reservations of the North American Indians are opened for settlement by the government in Washington, DC as part of the so-called Oklahoma Land Run . On the one hand the fate of the last free-living Indians and their state-sanctioned robbery is sealed, on the other hand this land is also released for conquest by white new settlers. Sabra Cravat, an American with French roots, and her husband Yancey Cravat really want to take this opportunity and head west to get a big slice of the country cake that is to be redistributed. Both want to build a new life in the west and run a farm. On the way there, they meet the married couple Tom Wyatt and Sarah Wyatt and their extensive, destitute family. Sabra gets a first impression of Yancey's big heart when she sees how naturally he leaves one of his covered wagons to the Wyatts in need.

Arriving in Oklahoma, Sabra meets a number of Yancey's acquaintances and friends. Among them is the perky Dixie Lee, obviously a former lover, who snatched the piece of earth from under the noses of Yancey and Sabra on which the Cravats wanted to build their farm when the run on the land to be forgiven began. For Dixie, this is an act of revenge against Yancey - for marrying Sabra and not her. Sabra quickly gets to know aspects of her new husband that she did not know before. For example, he campaigns for an American-Indian family, Arita and Ben Feather, who also want to participate in the land purchase, and risks being beaten in the process. Sabra is clearly more selfish and does not understand her husband's altruism. The land frenzy around the newly founded city of Osage quickly shows its worst side: When purchasing the new land, many newcomers proceed with great brutality, and newspaper editor Sam Pegler is killed in the process. The latter's widow remains shaken and leaves the area.

Yancey soon realizes that his life is not that of a farmer, and so he plans to stand up for the common good and for justice in general. Cravat succeeds Pegler as the new owner of the "Oklahoma Wigwam" in Osage. In view of the chaotic processes during the land allocation, he also wants to help establish state structures. With his commitment to more justice, he creates a lot of respect for himself on the one hand, but also enemies among those dignitaries and those in power whom he attacks. When Yancey protects the Jewish peddler Sol Levy from the two ruffians and gunslingers Yountis and William Hardy, a hothead known as "The Cherokee Kid," and tries to save the Red Feathers family, who is threatened by the two Indian-hating troublemakers, Sabra brings in the In the meantime, both son Cimarron were born. Yancey also learns that in these troubled pioneering times in the Wild West, sometimes only the language of the Colt is understood. While working for the Indian family, he had to shoot Bob Yountis, the murderer of Ben Red Feather, in a later bank robbery with subsequent hostage-taking in a school building in which The Cherokee Kid also took part, the unscrupulous criminal Wes Jennings, who in turn shortly before The Cherokee Kid shot down and killed. Sabra gets into a serious argument with her husband when he refuses to accept what he regards as blood money for killing Jennings. Sabra throws at her husband that he is blocking Cimarron's future. In this situation, Dixie Lee senses her chance to win Yancey back for herself. When she fails with this intention, she ends her life as a farmer in disaffection and turns her property into a brothel.

When things gradually got more orderly, the restless Yancey, always an adventurer by nature, decided to set off again in 1893, always looking for new challenges and adventures. He has heard that a new land frenzy is about to take place somewhere and he leaves his wife and child. The left Sabra, left to her own devices with Cimarron, takes over the newspaper and now has to practice her independence. She learns from Dixie Lee that Yancey first tried his luck in Alaska and then allegedly joined the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War in Cuba. When oil wells are discovered around Osage, Yancey returns to the city as suddenly after five years as he once left it. He wants to apologize to his wife and now plans to do everything better. With his newspaper, Yancey now shoots himself at Tom Wyatt, of all people, whom he had once so generously helped out. Because Wyatt has developed into an exploiter in his greed for money: "His" land once belonged to the Indians, and now a mighty oil well gushes there, which made Tom rich, while the former owners lose out. Yancey wants to run in the election for governor of the region, which was not yet part of the United States at the time. To do this, however, he needs the help of Wyatt and his powerful political friends. Should he let himself be corrupted? An easy decision for the moralist Yancey. Again, to the annoyance of Sabra, his sense of justice stands in the way of a great political career. He is unwilling to help defraud the indigenous people of the region, the displaced Indians, for the sake of a political career.

Sabra is so angry about her husband's decision to never think about herself and the family, but always only about the welfare of others that she throws him out of the house angrily. And again Yancey leaves his wife and their son, who a little later marries Ruby Red Feather, the daughter of the Indian couple who was rescued by his father, and sets off for new shores. In the years to come, a generous loan from Sol Levy, the man Yancey saved the life of a long time ago, gave Sabra the opportunity to develop the small newspaper publisher into a powerful media company and lead it to success. On the 25th anniversary of the "Oklahoma Wigwam" under Yancey Cravat's re-establishment, Sol Levy and Tom Wyatt want to celebrate and honor her as an outstanding pioneer in the development of the Wild West with a sculpture that symbolically embodies the pioneering spirit, but Sabra rejects this: Only her husband is due this merit. All but Yancey, who just (August 1914) volunteered with the British Expeditionary Forces at the start of World War I , have come together in Osage to celebrate the anniversary. In the final scene of the film, Sabra reads a letter from her husband from abroad, in which he apologizes for the disappointments that he has caused her all his life. Next to it is a telegram in which it is stated that Yancey Cravat was killed in action on the battlefields of Europe.

Production notes

Cimarron was shot at several locations in Arizona as well as at the Janss Conejo Ranch in Thousand Oaks and the 20th Century Fox Ranch (both California) (exterior shots) and at the MGM studios in Culver City (studio shots). The film premiered on December 1, 1960 in Oklahoma City. The mass start was February 16, 1961. The German premiere took place on March 24, 1961.

Production costs were approximately $ 5.421 million, according to IMDb, which was an extraordinarily large budget at the time. International revenues by the end of 1960 were already $ 4.825 million.

The film structures were created by George W. Davis , Addison Hehr , Henry Grace , Hugh Hunt and Otto Siegel . Franklin Milton was monitoring the sound . Glenn Ford received a Laurel Award nomination for Best Actor .

The film was at the Academy Awards 1961 in the categories Best Filmbauten and sound Best for the Oscar nominated.

Glenn Ford and Maria Schell, who have had a lifelong friendship since the filming, were again in front of the camera for Superman in 1977 .

useful information

Cimarron was created at a time when director Mann was specializing in monumental fabrics. Immediately before, he had been replaced in 1959 by the Spartacus film he had started (with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis ) and replaced by Stanley Kubrick . Immediately after Cimarron , Mann directed the historical epic El Cid with Charlton Heston in Spain in 1960 , and three years later he shot the late Roman antique drama The Fall of the Roman Empire at the same location .

Reviews

The international criticism, especially the English-language one, was very ungracious about the film, which was repeatedly reviled as a "monumental bore". Here are a few examples:

Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times : “To cut a long story short, the film is superficial and the characters are of no quality. There is an insinuation, but no explanation, for the classy, ​​flighty guy Mr. Ford is. What is supposed to be a mean, insidious woman is portrayed by Miss Schell as an affected, pious representative of her kind. "

The Movie & Video Guide found that Edna Ferber's novel degenerated into “an indifferent, sprawling soap opera” that was “not saved by a few spectacular scenes”.

Halliwell's Film Guide found the film to be "a slack, mercilessly boring remake".

"Formally appealing, in the second half the material slips into a conventional family chronicle."

Cinema expressed itself somewhat more graciously and judged: "Despite some lengths, the remake from 1960 can easily hold its own next to the original by Wesley Ruggles, which won an Oscar in 1931."

"Anthony Mann ... impressively describes a gripping chapter in North American history: The great adventures of the land grabbing are drawing to a close, and the struggle for economic and journalistic power is taking their place. The sympathetic adventurer Yancey Cravat, embodied by Glenn Ford, impresses with his dynamism and determination, but he stands for a fading time. The future belongs to people like his self-sacrificing wife Sabra, whom Maria Schell draws just as engagingly. "

Great Western Movies recalls that this is "Director Anthony Mann's final western and not one of his better ones."

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cimarron in The New York Times, February 17, 1961
  2. ^ Leonard Maltin : Movie & Video Guide, 1996 edition, p. 232
  3. ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 200
  4. ^ Cimarron in the Lexicon of International Films , accessed on October 12, 2018 Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  5. Cimarron on cinema de.
  6. Cimarron on wunschliste.de
  7. ^ Cimarron on thegreatwesternmovies.com

Web links