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This movie has been on today in a magnificent restoration and score by Franz Waxman. I hadn't seen it before, and Maria Schell was lovely as Yantze's wife.
Quite entertaining, directed by Anthony Mann, even though not a film of the first rank.
I agree 100%. Good movie and a memorable score by Waxman. The FSM CD ist fantastic.
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Posted: |
Jul 19, 2014 - 4:03 PM
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By: |
Regie
(Member)
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Interesting comments about the film and Glenn Ford. I thought he was superb in Delmar Daves' 3.10 to Yuma; he was always at his best when intense and conflicted (also marvellous in "Gilda"). Saw him recently in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" and he sleep-walked through that role!!
Anthony Mann was one of my favourite directors, especially those 50's westerns like "The Naked Spur", "Bend in the River", "Winchester 73". However, I thought "Cimarron" was very mixed in quality; the land-grab scene was improbable because it disallowed suspension of disbelief for me - especially when those buck-boards and wagons were smashed as if in a bugs bunny cartoon. The film also didn't show HOW each land section was claimed - that always intrigued me.
Ferber's book (I haven't read it) is obviously an epic and I didn't get a sense of this in the film; i.e. that time has elapsed and consequences have occured. The elisions to show time having passed just didn't work; next minute Sabra is saying "my husband hasn't contacted me for 10 years" and this didn't link with the previous scene! That happened twice; at one stage he was in Mexico with a bunch of dudes and I was thinking "what the..?". So, there were real problems. The Ann Baxter character was completely enigmatic - we found out nothing about her. Let's say, the adaptation of Ferber should have been more rigorous, but perhaps Mann simply copied the 1930's version of the film (which I also haven't seen)?
Other adaptations of Ferber haven't worked so well either - for example, "Come and Get It" (1938).
Charming aspects of his 1960 "Cimarron" were the ensemble pieces between an interesting bunch of characters; the development of Schell's Sabra, which was only hinted at in the beginning of the film; the look of the film - its cinematography and production design and, of course, Waxman's music.
After it finished I was thinking, 'if you're going to adapt an epic you have to have a rigorous, over-arching design and plot outcome'. I don't think this occurred and the film didn't do justice to Yantze, his newspaper or philanthropic/social justice tendencies. The last scene was that of a love story.
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