The First Western To Win Best Picture At The Oscars

In the history of the Academy Awards, only 17 Westerns have ever been nominated for Best Picture. A brief list of the nominees: "In Old Arizona" (1928), "Cimarron" (1931), "Viva Villa!" (1934), "Stagecoach" (1939), "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943), "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948), "High Noon" (1952), "Shane" (1953), "How the West Was Won" (1963), "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969), "Dances with Wolves" (1990), "Unforgiven" (1992), "No Country for Old Men" (2007), "True Grit" (2010), "Django Unchained" (2012), "Hell or High Water" (2016), and "The Power of the Dog" (2021).

Others may be on the border of the genre, like, say, "Brokeback Mountain" or "The Revenant," but the above 17 are indisputable.

The first of those 17 films to win Best Picture was Wesley Ruggles' American history epic "Cimarron," one of the highest-reviewed films of its day. Variety's 1931 review of the film praised it as one of the modern age's great spectacles, a pinnacle of pop filmmaking. The reviewer wrote that "Ruggles apparently gets the full credit for this splendid and heavy production. His direction misses nothing in the elaborate scenes, as well as in the usual filmmaking procedure." The New York Times was equally effusive, saying it was one of "the high spots of the year," and that it was a "bona-fide epic." 

But those reviews are over 90 years old. In 2024, "Cimarron" has been reappraised multiple times, and nowadays, it ranks as one of the worst films to have ever won Best Picture. Its story now reads as painfully male-centric, racist, and the film at large celebrates the horrors of American colonialism. In the early 1930s, tales of bold American industrialism were seen as a success story. Compare "Cimarron" to Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon," and you'll begin to realize that a lot needed to be killed and destroyed for white men to become the mythic "titans of industry" they were celebrated as.

The main character of "Cimarron" is Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), a man who has enthusiastically uprooted his family to participate in the great Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. Two million acres of what was once Seminole and Creek land was suddenly deemed by the United States government to be officially open for settlement, and 50,000 people literally lined up to grab and claim whatever land they wanted. The opening sequence of all 50,000 people taking off to steal land is a vast, exciting, cinematic sequence. Yancey's wife, Sabra (Irene Dunn) loathes the idea and hates everything Yancey is doing. Yancey, however, is depicted as bold and forward-thinking, presented as one of the Great Men required to ensure America was built. 

The family settles in Osage, Oklahoma, and Yancey establishes himself as a publisher as well as a freelance lawman, eager to whip the town into shape. The town continues to boom. When Yancey kills a local outlaw (William Collier, Jr.), he flees Osage in disgust, leaving Sabra to run his newspaper on her own. She manages to make the newspaper enormous in his absence, but there's a feeling that she's only holding the paper for him until his return. He does five years later, just in time to serve as a heroic, freelance lawyer for a wrongfully convicted woman (Estelle Taylor). Then ... Yancey vanishes again. 

Sabra continues to run Yancy's affairs, and she is ultimately the one who does all the hard work in making Osage become as large as it did. She is, however, horrendously racist toward the Natives and she and the other settlers run off their land.

Sabra, however, eventually learns to be more tolerant and ultimately becomes a hero to the Osage, representing their interests by becoming a member of Congress. 

Yancey returns at the very end of the film when he and Sabra are elderly. By now, there has already been an oil boom in Osage, and the town is as large as it has ever been. Yancey, unrecognizable, staggers back into the city, just in time to rescue some workers from an oil explosion. He is injured in the rescue, however, and dies in Sabra's arms. 

While it's clear that Sabra is the real hero of "Cimarron," Yancey is repeatedly treated like the one bold decision-maker and the actual founder of everything. There is a sexist bent to the film for sure, no matter how Sabra emerges as strong and victorious. Ruggles' film also happily depicts the "Land Rush" as a net positive for America, rarely stopping to consider the horrid theft that the Native Americans experienced at the time. For the Natives, this is a horror story. 

"Cimarron" currently only sports a 52% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, culled from 33 reviews (including one of my own). Pauline Kael hated it, writing about the film in her book "5001 Nights at the Movies." She called it "a numbskull trek through the hardships and glories of the American heritage." I find the film to be mannered, stiff, and un-dynamic, with only its opening rush sequence having any energy or visual acumen. It's not the worst film to win Best Picture — that honor is a toss-up between "Green Book," "Crash," "Gladiator," and "The Greatest Show on Earth," in my opinion — but it's certainly down there.

"Cimarron" comes from a genre of film that isn't really in vogue anymore; the Building of America genre. The 1930s especially were replete with larger-than-life dramas about how America was built, and presented without a lick of irony or self-awareness. Great sacrifices were made, and great ideas were enacted by stalwart, intelligent white men. These were incomplete visions of history and were so jingoistic that Ronald Reagan is becoming aroused from the afterlife. These kinds of epics are still the bedrock of American cinema and require constant deconstruction by other filmmakers. 

Indeed, in recent decades, similar dramas have been made by wiser directors who deliberately refute the jingoism of a previous generation. Most recently, and most directly connected to "Cimarron," one might recall Martin Scorsese's Best Picture nominee "Killers of the Flower Moon." That film also took place in Osage but focused more on the Osage people, and their deliberate and systematic exploitation by callow, whiny white guys. William King Hale (Robert De Niro) moved onto Osage land, claiming to be an advocate, when really he was there to marry off the Osage women to white men, and then convince the men to poison them and steal their oil wealth. The film was nominated for 10 Oscars but won zero. 

William King Hale was presented by Scorsese as a dark mirror to Yancey Cravat. They were both presented as bold builders of society on the outside, but Yancey was a hero to his core, while Hale was rotten and evil. Both, however, we infected with confidence and boldness. It didn't take clever mavericks to build America, Scorsese said. It took evil people with the confidence and wherewithal to hurt others, steal land, claim they had a mandate to do so, and then feel no remorse.