--- title: "Cimarron" year: 1960 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/cimarron" fi1m_score: 57 critics_reviews: 3 published: "2026-09-19T21:38:03.821544+00:00" updated: "2026-09-19T21:38:58.418525+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Cimarron (1960) Directed by Anthony Mann · 2h 27m · MPA NR · Western **Fi1m score: 57** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* The land rush lasts ten minutes and the marriage lasts forty years, and you feel every one of those years > Anthony Mann stages the Oklahoma land rush as well as anyone has ever staged anything on horseback, and then spends two hours on a marriage that goes round in circles. Worth an evening for the opening; the rest is patient, handsome and slow. ## Synopsis Oklahoma Territory, April 1889. Yancey Cravat (Glenn Ford), a lawyer who has never stayed anywhere long, brings his new wife Sabra (Maria Schell) west to join thousands of settlers lined up for the government’s land rush. Alongside them wait the farmer Tom Wyatt (Arthur O’Connell) and his wife Sarah (Mercedes McCambridge), the peddler Sol Levy (David Opatoshu), and Dixie Lee (Anne Baxter), a woman on her own with a fast horse. When the gun fires, the wagons go, and Yancey comes back without the claim he rode for. He settles Sabra in the raw new town of Osage, takes up with the newspaperman Sam Pegler (Robert Keith), and finds that an old acquaintance, William Hardy (Russ Tamblyn), now known as the Cherokee Kid, has come to the territory to rob it. ## Review Anthony Mann’s *Cimarron* is a 147-minute adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel, written for the screen by Arnold Schulman, and it means to cover the making of Oklahoma from the land rush of 1889 to the age of oil. It is the second time the book has been filmed; the first was in 1931. This one is bigger, better shot and, for its first quarter of an hour, close to thrilling. After that it becomes a long, decent, slightly weary account of a woman waiting for her husband to come home, and we found ourselves waiting with her. The rush is the reason to see it. Mann and Robert L. Surtees put the camera low and wide and let the line of wagons stretch to both edges of the frame, so that when the gun goes off the whole horizon seems to lurch forward. Buckboards overturn, a wheel comes off, riders go down under other riders, and Surtees keeps the dust in front of the lens so we lose sight of people just as they lose sight of each other. John Dunning cuts it fast but never so fast that we cannot tell whose horse is whose, and Franz Waxman’s brass is loud, plain and exactly right. We sat up, which at our age takes some doing, and for ten minutes we would have followed the film anywhere. Then it stops in Osage and stays there. Glenn Ford plays Yancey as a good man who cannot bear to be in a room for long, courteous to everyone and reliable to no one, and Ford is honest enough not to make that charming. Maria Schell has the harder part, because Sabra is the one who does not leave, and Schulman’s script asks her mainly to stand in doorways and be disappointed. Schell plays it with more steel than the writing offers; when she takes over a task Yancey has abandoned, her face does not soften and we liked her for it. The scenes between the two are civil, well lit and repetitive. The town around them is better company. Arthur O’Connell and Mercedes McCambridge play the Wyatts as a comedy of stubbornness, a farmer who wants nothing and a wife who wants everything, and they are the only pair in the film whose arguments we looked forward to. David Opatoshu gives Sol Levy a quiet dignity the script does not always earn. Anne Baxter’s Dixie Lee is set up as a rival and then left mostly on the shelf. Russ Tamblyn makes the Cherokee Kid a grinning, jittery boy with a gun, and Vic Morrow and Charles McGraw, as Wes Jennings and Bob Yountis, supply the meanness the town otherwise lacks. The trouble is shape. Schulman moves the story forward in captions, and each caption lands us in a slightly larger Osage with slightly grander problems, so that Walter Plunkett’s costumes end up doing the work of narrative: Sabra’s dresses go from calico to bustles to something approaching Edwardian, and that is how we know time has passed. Yancey rides off, comes back, rides off. The second half takes turns we will not describe, but we can say the pattern does not change, and somewhere in the third repetition we were bored, and then irritated at being bored by a film that had shown us it knew how to move. Mann’s own Westerns of the 1950s, the ones with James Stewart, were about a single man who wanted one thing and was prepared to be ugly to get it. That is what he is good at: pressure inside a frame. Ferber’s book is the opposite kind of thing, a chronicle in which a whole territory grows up, and Mann handles the crowd scenes with a mastery the domestic scenes never approach. It is the wrong director for the material, or the wrong material for a very good director, and either way the film knows it only in its first reel. The few critics who wrote about it at the time were split, with one calling it rousing and the others calling it dull, and we land between them, closer to dull. See it for the land rush, which belongs on the largest screen you can find; at home it shrinks and the marriage grows, and you will be surprised how long forty years can take. *Fi1m score 57, published 19 September 2026.* ## What the critics say With only 3 reviews in so far, the verdict on this remake leans negative, and the one point of agreement is the land-rush sequence: even the critics who dislike the film concede it opens strongly. Variety stands alone in praising the whole, finding the mix of action and character drama well judged and admiring Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. The New York Times and The New Yorker both think the film falls away after that opening into a sentimental, stereotyped frontier saga, with thin characters and a runtime that drags; The New Yorker goes further and wonders whether the story was ever worth telling. ### Reviews we read (3) - **Variety** (90/100, inferred): The critic praises the balance of rousing action and character drama in the remake, highlighting the masterful handling of the land-rush spectacle and the performances of Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. [Read](https://variety.com/1959/film/reviews/cimarron-2-1200419726/) - **The New Yorker** (30/100, inferred): The critic deems the remake a dull, dim work that drags on for over two hours and questions whether the original story was ever worthwhile, criticizing its soapy elements and excessive detail. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1961/02/25/new-old-frontier) - **The New York Times**, Bosley Crowther (30/100, inferred): The critic finds the film superficial and sentimental after its strong opening land-rush sequence, with characters lacking depth and the story settling into a stereotyped frontier saga. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1961/02/17/archives/screen-new-cimarronremake-of-book-opens-at-the-music-hall.html) ## Details - **Director:** Anthony Mann - **Director:** Anthony Mann - **Screenplay:** Arnold Schulman - **Novel:** Edna Ferber - **Cinematography:** Robert L. Surtees - **Editor:** John Dunning - **Music:** Franz Waxman - **Costume design:** Walter Plunkett - **Producer:** Edmund Grainger - **Cast:** Glenn Ford as Yancey 'Cimarron' Cravat; Maria Schell as Sabra Cravat; Anne Baxter as Dixie Lee; Arthur O'Connell as Tom Wyatt; Russ Tamblyn as William Hardy, The Cherokee Kid; Mercedes McCambridge as Mrs. Sarah Wyatt; Vic Morrow as Wes Jennings; Robert Keith as Sam Pegler - **Runtime:** 2h 27m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 1 December 1960 - **Genres:** Western - **Budget:** $6 million - **Box office:** $11 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytDIPs1ksVI ## Where to watch in the US - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-19.* Also available in: AU, BR, CA, GB, IN, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1961: Best Art Direction, Color (nominated); Best Sound (nominated) ## If you liked this - *The Naked Spur* (1953): Mann at his tightest: five people, one mountain, and no room to ride away - *Giant* (1956): Ferber’s other decades-long saga, with oil, land and a marriage that goes somewhere - *Red River* (1948): The cattle drive as the making of a country, with the argument kept in one wagon - *The Emigrants* (1971): Swedes cross to Minnesota; the pioneer story told slowly and without a single caption - *Far and Away* (1992): Borrows the Oklahoma land rush wholesale and is otherwise very silly; the rush still works --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/cimarron