CIMARRON (1960) *** Some stories are best, most true, airbrushed a little bit. It eliminates some of the distractions that would magnify beyond their true import. The Oklahoma landrush looks tough, brutal, but it's all presented in an incongruous and wholesome manner that feels like truth. It's a love story, of a kind. I don't know exactly how a man can love a woman so much that he leaves her for five or ten years at a time, but it's an idea that's delivered with some credibility, and perhaps best expressed (ironically, appropriately) in the scene between Anne Baxter and Maria Schell. Glenn Ford cuts all the right poses, without letting them look like poses, but the really fascinating bit is watching success turn Schell into her own mother. It's a tremendous character study, and she dishes out the resources to keep it...cinematic. The anti-racist commentary is very in your face, and I don't know how the subject matter could otherwise be appropriately addressed. Some of the backdrops are hysterically bad (the Oklahoma plains couldn't possibly look more like a badly painted set in one scene, and the Capitol is even worse), but it's all told so diligently, and in such a forthright manner, that for once I felt almost guilty for being amused. Almost. I wouldn't feel comfortable calling it a masterpiece, but it feels very much like a last glance at a piece of America that had a big heart, a lot of guts, and wasn't easily amused.
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