Cimarron (1931)

The 1931 western Cimarron is on a short list of Oscar's most obscure best picture winners, and in a year that included such award-eligible features as Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, breakout gangster dramas starring Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, and Bela Lugosi's horror classic Dracula, also one of its most undeserving.

But if you like your American history uncomplicated and your movies pleasantly forgettable, Cimarron is not half bad.

The story begins in 1889 with the Oklahoma Land Rush — where 50,000 people lined up at the border and raced to claim the two million acres the U.S. government had opened up for settlement, a perfectly insane way to parcel out land — and ends in 1930 with the descendants of these settlers marinating in oil wealth.

Cimarron stars Richard Dix as a hard-luck rancher turned newspaper publisher, and Irene Dunne as his long-suffering wife. Dix kills an outlaw and flees the territory, leaving his wife to run the paper, winning her fame and social status, and eventually a term in Congress.

Based on Edna Ferber's best-selling novel, Cimarron's audience would have been old enough to remember the events depicted — which were roughly as distant in time to them as Ronald Reagan is to us — and the movie was a critical hit even though it lost money at the box office.

Dunne was nominated for the first of five Oscars (she never won) and she carries the movie. Dix, on the other hand, was on the fast track to oblivion, drinking his way to B-picture has-been status within a couple of years.

As a history lesson, Cimarron is more about the myth of the American West than the reality — plucky settlers make good against the odds, and the right people find a fortune in the ground.

That the oil originally belonged to the Osage Nation is largely glossed over except to suggest that the previous owners were grateful that civilized white men had relieved them of the burden of managing all that money.

If you've got six hours to kill, might I suggest watching Cimarron as a double feature with Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon? The story of corporate theft and murder in the Osage Nation after oil is discovered on their land, Flower Moon's locale and time line overlaps with Cimarron's and provides a radically different perspective on the same moment in history.

Sure, after watching the two, you'll suffer a serious case of mental whiplash — what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" (which I've written about here) — but you're a smart crew, you can take it.

As hard as it is to believe — given that the intervening years would see the premieres of Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Shane, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch and many, many more — Cimarron was the last western to win the Oscar for best picture until Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves sixty years later.

If you ever wonder what motivates otherwise seemingly sane people like me to start handing out alternate Oscars, there's a good part of your answer right there.