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- Title
Cimarron: The New Western History in 1931.
- Authors
Smyth, J. E.
- Abstract
This article presents an analysis of the motion picture, Cimarron, released by RKO Pictures in early 1931, which concerned the history of an Oklahoma pioneering couple's marriage from the birth of the territory in 1889 to the film's 1930 production year. Even before the film's completion, the U.S. motion picture community anticipated Cimarron as innovative U.S. historical cinema, and following its premiere, the studio and the trade papers presented the film as both an authoritative historical document and a landmark of U.S. cinematic achievement. At the end of the decade, filmmaker and historian Lewis Jacobs reiterated its effect on historical cinema, and as time passed, motion picture executives and trade papers tried to justify big-budget historical Westerns by invoking Cimarron's memory. The film's name became a sort of talisman of artistic achievement for an industry traditionally credited with a short memory. In addition, filmmaker and historian Paul Rotha would remember the film as the U.S. cinema's one accurate study of social history. Allegedly, academic film scholarship virtually ignored the industry's former masterpiece. The film allegedly did not seem to fit within the traditional critical framework for the classical Western motion picture an abstract genre world of a massive myth-making apparatus.
- Subjects
UNITED States; CIMARRON (Film); FILM criticism; MOTION picture evaluation; WESTERN films; RKO Pictures LLC; MOTION picture industry
- Publication
Film & History (03603695), 2003, Vol 33, Issue 1, p9
- ISSN
0360-3695
- Publication type
Entertainment Review
- DOI
10.1353/flm.2003.a396035