Them Thar Hills (1934) and Tit For Tat (1935)

Laurel and Hardy won an Oscar for their short The Music Box; Tit For Tat earned their second and last nomination (they didn't win). It's actually a sequel—their only one—to a short called Them Thar Hills, from the year before.

The earlier farce featured Charlie Hall and Mae Busch as a married couple who run afoul of The Boys after they've made coffee with water contaminated by bootleg booze dumped into a well. Once again, Mr. Hardy's obliging doctor has recommended a camping vacation so Ollie's broken leg can heal in the clean mountain air. The Boys pull an Airstream trailer to a spot they think will be the perfect one at which to settle for a few days. There's even a well from which they can hoist fresh water.

What we know and they don't is that prior to their arrival, some guv'ment officers have chased away a gang of moonshiners. The miscreants, in order to fool the feds, have poured all their booze down the well and the water is loaded with several barrels of homemade who-hit-John.

Hall and Busch arrive on foot, their car having run out of gas further down the mountainside. Stan and Ollie send Charlie back with a can of gasoline. Mae stays with them and they, ever the little gentlemen, offer her a freshly brewed cup of coffee. All three of them get stinko and they don't even know it. When Charlie returns, all hell breaks loose.

In the sequel, Stan and Ollie open a new hardware store next to Charlie's grocery. The Boys want to make up and be friends, but the grocer is still angry about their previous contretemps and, in typical Laurel and Hardy fashion, a minor expression of annoyance builds to all-out combat to the death. While the three men storm back and forth between their stores, committing mayhem on each other's goods, a fella no one even knows robs the hardware store to its last widget.

Busch was a favorite in the Laurel and Hardy films. Her great moment came playing Hardy's wife in Sons of the Desert. Hall, an Englishman like Laurel, served as foil to Stan and Ollie in over two dozen films. He'd come to America as part of the same Fred Karno music hall troupe that gave us Charlie Chaplin and Laurel, who was Chaplin's understudy.

For my taste, there are more laughs in two reels of Laurel and Hardy than there are in two hours of Judd Apatow—and Tit For Tat is about 90 percent improvisation. Laurel later admitted that they began shooting with no script and so just made it all up as they went along. Ah, those were the days.

7

Flesh (1932)

In Barton Fink the Coen Brothers created a New York playwright who decides to take a whack at Hollywood script-writing. His first assignment is a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery. If the character of Fink had been suggested by Moss Hart instead of Clifford Odets, Flesh would have been the movie he worked on. It's a wrestling picture with Wallace Beery.

Beery is Polakai, a waiter who doubles as a wrestler at the beer garden where he works. He's also the German champ, which means either wrestling didn't pay well or Weimar Germany had the toughest damn waiters in Europe. One day a recently released female con named Laura (Karen Morley) stops by the joint to enjoy a meal she can't pay for. Polakai, who is an old softy (in the heart and in the head) feels sorry for her and pays her tab. Later that night, seeing her caught in the rain, he invites her to share his apartment. She does and soon he is madly in love and she has a comfortable compartment on the gravy train.

Not long after that, her brother shows up for a visit with the newly married couple. Brother Nicky (Ricardo Cortez, in full greasy-arrogant manner) is really Laura's long-time lover and partner in crime. He tells her what a sap she was to marry this polooka only to discover that she had to due to the fact that she's pregnant with Nicky's baby. It's a little hard to figure out the film's chronology—women in Germany must have remained pregnant for a lot longer than nine months.

Anyway, Polakai and Laura sail to America so he can make some real money at his sport only to discover that Nicky, who is now Polakai's manager, has hooked the big guy up with a crooked promoter. Melodrama ensues.

Beery's accent comes and goes, often within the same sentence. Annoying as that can be when he goes absolutely California flat, it doesn't matter when director John Ford couldn't care less about any real Germanness, except for the oompah music. The background could just as easily be Irish.

The fact that Nicky pushes his gal into another man's bed doesn't bother either him or her. Laura will eventually start to feel sorry for Polakai, who is such a big cluck he'd bring out the cynicism in Little Mary Sunshine. "I'm not going back," she yells at Nicky. "I've done all I'm going to do to that man." I guess the title, in addition to suggesting something unpleasant about wrestling, is meant to reference "the way of all flesh."

The usual cast of MGM supporting players is one hand, including Jean Hersholt, Herman Bing, and Edward Brophy. The dialogue was written by Moss Hart from a story by Leonard Praskins, who had worked on Beery's Best Actor Oscar-winning vehicle The Champ the year before. (He tied with Fredric March.) There's nothing here to keep you awake.

Whatever charm Beery held for audiences in the 1930s is lost on me in this one.

6

Rawhide (1938)

I suspect that one of the reasons movie fans get frustrated with reviewers is that so many reviewers forget that movies can exist just to be fun. Social and artistic merit are wonderful bonuses and critic/historians should look for them, but plain old dumb fun is a worthy reason for a picture to exist, too. Reviewers are not critics and shouldn't overreach by writing about qualities they perhaps know too little about.

Which brings us to Rawhide, a charming little oater starring long-forgotten "B" singing cowboy Smith Ballew as a lawyer in the modern western town of Rawhide. He's looking for a local rancher who is willing to buck the president of the Rancher's Protective Association, which is nothing more than a protection racket. President Ed Saunders (Arthur Loft) has raised the price of ranch supplies to an exorbitant level and has his men rein terror on anyone who brings in goods from out of town.

But here comes baseball legend Lou Gehrig and his sister Peggy (Evalyn Knapp) who refuse to sign with the association and join instead with the lawyer to destroy the RPA. When Saunders, trying to appear friendly, warns Lou that "you don't want to be a holdout," Lou replies with a grin, "Aw, I've been a holdout before."

And that's the fun in this picture, the way screenwriters Dan Jarrett and Jack Natteford slip Gehrig's baseballisms into the story. At one point Lou prevents his sister from signing the contract with Saunders by whacking a baseball through the crook's office window. (The kids of the town scatter like the wind.) In another scene Lou mixes it up--or should I say tommixes it up--in a saloon brawl but tames the baddies by standing behind the pool table and bouncing pool balls off their heads.

Gehrig delivers his lines with a twinkle that reaches from the screen to say, "Hey, look at me--I'm in the movies!" He's not a natural actor, being absent during the heavy emoting, but he is a convincing goof. He can't put his spurs on or mount a horse withouth crawling up its side. When he's thrown the first time he tries to ride, he sits in the dirt and wisecracks "Strike one."

He is marvelously amiable and is a lot more fun to watch than most athletes who moonlight in the movies. He even lip syncs one of the film's four songs. If anything, the guy was a good sport.

Even a die hard Red Sox fan could be forgiven for having a good time with the Pride of the Yankees in this one, directed by Ray Taylor. Play ball!, uh, I mean Action!
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5

Night Nurse (1931)

Pre-code Hollywood films, those made between the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 and April, 1934, when studios were finally forced to enforce it, can get pretty wild and wooly, but few of them are as nuts as Night Nurse, from Warners. Director William A. Wellman didn't get the nickname "Wild Bill" from his involvement with this movie, but he could have.

The picture stars Barbara Stanwyck as Lora Hart, who is turned down for a job as a nurse in training at a metropolitan hospital by Miss Dillon, the Superintendent of Nurses (Vera Lewis). It seems that Lora had to drop out of high school in her junior year when her mother died and you had to have a high school diploma to become a nurse. Leaving the hospital she runs into Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger), the boss doctor. He is impressed by her enthusiasm, and we may assume her looks, so she gets the job and becomes the roommate of another nurse in training, B. Maloney (Joan Blondell).

Let me stop right here to spend a minute or two (or more) as a Dirty Old Man. Stanwyck and Blondell are absolute knock-outs in this movie and Wellman piles on the prurience by taking every available opportunity to have the two of them strip out of their dresses. (I counted three times each, and I hadn't reached the point of blindness yet.) These hints of better things to come are not the only reminders that this is a pre-code film. It also contains drunkenness, child abuse and endangerment, attempted murder, attempted rape, bootlegging, medical malpractice, wild parties, murder, slapping dames around, and a generally cynical acceptance that this is the way life is.

After graduation, Hart and Maloney both go to work caring for a pair of pre-school-aged sisters who had been patients at the hospital. The girls grow weaker by the day and their doctor (Ralf Harolde) claims not to know what's wrong with them. Lora begins to suspect that the kids are being murdered by lack of nutrition, a theory that becomes a certainty when she finds out that the kids have a trust fund and that their alcoholic mother (Charlotte Merriam) is under the thumb of Nick the Chauffeur (Clark Gable), who wants that money.

Good Dr. Bell advises Lora to play along until she has enough evidence to blow the whistle on Nick and the crooked doctor. Nick figures out what she's up to and Lora has to be rescued by Mortie (Ben Lyon), a bootlegger out of whom she once extracted a bullet without telling the cops.

While maintaining a respect for the good deeds and intentions of dedicated doctors and nurses, the movie doesn't hesitate to point out that all is not well within the medical profession. "Say," Blondell wisecracks at one point, "I was afraid the hospital would burn down before I could get into it. Now I have to watch myself with matches."

The script is by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Charles Kenyon, adapted from a novel by Grace Perkins writing as Dora Macy. It's sassy and borderline anarchic, and as such a portrait of Wild Bill Wellman and it represents nicely the kind of picture Warner Bros. turned out regularly during this period. It's street smart and cynical, with a respect for ethics and decency it pretends it wants to hide. It's also hugely entertaining and a chance to see Gable as an absolute rat. (James Cagney was supposed to play Nick but he'd become a star in Wellman's The Public Enemy and Warners didn't want to waste him in a supporting role. Gable had a couple more years to wait.)

3

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)

I suspect that the very first joke about marriage went like this: Two cavemen met one day and the first one said, "Who was that giant ground sloth I saw you with last night?" and the second one answered "That was no giant ground sloth; that was my wife."

Well, it used to slay the boys at Lascaux.

The movies have provided a means of relating the marriage joke from the earliest days of fictional one-reelers. The image of wife-dom usually suffered most through these quick anecdotes, which is only to be expected since men were telling the stories. The onscreen husbands, played by almost every silent and pre-code talking comedian at one time or another, were just regular guys looking for a little extra-curricular fun. Their wives were the spoil sports, taking the idea of being civilizing influences way too seriously.

The screen's first comedy team specialized in these mini-situation comedies. John Bunny and Flora Finch made something like 100 shorts for Vitagraph between 1910 and Bunny's death in 1915. Only a handful of these pictures survive. They weren't all domestic comedies but that genre dominated their output with titles like And His Wife Came Back, Mr. Bunnyhug Buys a Hat for His Wife, Thou Shalt Not Covet, and Which Way Did He Go? (in which Bunny's character is named "Mr. Henpecko").

Bunny, a native New Yorker, was short and heavy while London-born Finch was tall and thin. After Bunny's death, Finch stayed in movies—her last role being an uncredited bit in The Women (MGM, 1939) before her passing in 1940—but she never again achieved anything like the popularity she'd garnered as Bunny's screen wife. Her post-Bunny comic chops are on display as Aunt Susan in Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (Universal, 1927).

Bunny and Finch mark a good place to start looking at the marriage joke in early films because in at least one way they lived the joke themselves: they weren't really man and wife, but they hated each other anyway.

In the best known of their few surviving one-reelers, A Cure For Pokeritis (1912), they are George and Mary Brown. George enjoys a weekly night out with the boys for a poker session. Their meeting place is the clichéd masculine den of impropriety: guys are sitting at tables shuffling and dealing, their shirt sleeves rolled up and ties loosened. Many wear eye shades; cigars and cigarettes are plentiful. All the place lacks are a pool table and a sinister coachman to be Pinocchio's Pleasure Island.

George consistently loses at cards. This night, he even has to borrow trolley fare home. He staggers in late, disheveled and looking like he's on the far side of a two-week drunk. Mary is sitting up waiting for him, growing angrier each minute she's forced to wait. He arrives and swears contrition. He'll never play poker again.

A week later, one of his friends comes up with a plot. George will pretend to join a lodge called "Sons of the Morning" that meets every Wednesday night. Mary believes him—not the first mistake she's made in this marriage, including answering "I do." The scheme would work well if George didn't talk in his sleep. We are to assume that a) he's never done this before, b) Mary has never noticed it before, or c) we're not to think about it.

At this point, the second familiar element of the marriage joke becomes apparent: the wife's relative. Be they lazy, inept, greedy, vice-ridden, unemployable, smarmy, or just plain stupid, wifey's relations are the stuff of domestic misery. In this case, the bane is Cousin Freddie, a dandified wuss who flutters his hands and rolls his eyes as Mary fills him in on George's skullduggery. To make all husbands in the audience like this guy even less, he enlists the aid of his Bible class in spying on George. How much less of a real man can you be than a Bible study participant?

The dénouement arrives after heaping helpings of deceit, disguise and distrust. Apparently George has learned the lesson Mary set out for him. All will end well with George and Mary embracing. What hubby doesn't know is that Mary is responsible for breaking up his poker gang by uncovering his deception and then going him one better. Each of them is a trickster and neither really has any reason to believe the other. The loving clinch at the end is merely convention. We all know that if George can come up with another trick, he'll use it to reorganize his poker night.

We're also left to ponder this question: why does Mary go to such lengths to break up George's fun? Yes, he loses every week but we see nothing that indicates his poker losses are doing anything to undermine the Browns' financial stability. He's not stealing to cover his debts. He's not contemplating taking any winnings to run off with the office steno girl. The missus seems to want to put a halt to his night out just because it is his night out. Maybe she wants to make the emasculation complete by having him take up studying the good book, like Cousin Freddie.

Just as with a stand-up joke, there is no back story to this little movie. Mary does what she does because it is in the nature of wives to prevent their husbands from having any fun that doesn't include them—which from the male point of view is no fun at all.

2

Freaks (1932)

Freaks was first released over 75 years ago. I think I've avoided giving away the movie's biggest surprise, but there are a few fairly insignificant spoilers ahead.

Freaks is a movie that has to be seen either more than once, or not at all. It generates a kaleidoscope of reactions when seen for the first time, and it's impossible to sort them all out with a single viewing, which will overwhelm you emotionally—but it takes repeated visits to this surreal masterpiece to determine an intellectual response.

It's a movie that's rich with anecdotes. One has Irving Thalberg, the film's uncredited producer, telling director Tod Browning that he wanted to make the horror movie to end all horror movies, and then saying, when he saw the finished product, "Well, I asked for it and I got it."

One story has it that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was under contract as a writer at MGM when the picture was made, bolted from the studio commissary and threw-up when the unusual cast came in for lunch. Another version has it that Fitzgerald felt more at ease with the cast of Freaks than he did with the studio big shots and so sat with them and lunched at their table.

Some say that Tod Browning exploited the cast (only Olga Roderick, the Bearded Lady, went on record later as saying she regretted her participation in the production) while others claim that Browning, a former circus and sideshow man himself, befriended the performers and set them up for life by turning them into international celebrities.

One thing is certain: no other Hollywood film has ever generated legends like these.

As the story opens, we are moving slowly through a sideshow. The indoor talker, who bears a striking resemblance to Tod Browning, begins to tell his audience the back story of the show's most unusual attraction. He and his audience gather around the top of a walled pit from the interior of which a light is shining up. Then we slip into the past …

A well-tailored dwarf named Hans (Harry Earles, who had worked with Browning in the silent version of The Unholy Three) is engaged to Frieda, another dwarf (Daisy Earles, Harry's sister in real life). Despite his betrothal to Frieda, Hans is smitten by Cleopatra, the circus' star aerialist (Olga Baclanova). Cleopatra encourages the little man's attentions because he is willing to loan her money and buy her presents.

Cleo's casual cruelty is the talk of the circus. Everyone knows that she is playing Hans for a sucker except Hans, who continues to harbor the delusion that she likes him.

Unknown to Hans, Cleo is actually romantically involved with Hercules, the strong man (Henry Victor). We first see Hercules as he wrestles a bull, the animal's horns representing both the phallus and the traditional crown of the cuckold.

Finally, Frieda confronts Cleopatra and begs the big woman to leave Hans alone. She lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune and we can see on Cleo's face that she decides to change her amused encouragement of the little man to a determined attempt to woo him. She soon maneuvers Hans into a proposal, which she accepts with a plan to poison him and steal his money.

The wedding feast provides the background for the film's most celebrated and quoted scene. Cleopatra, Hercules, the freaks and the other circus normals who have befriended them are gathered around a large table under the big top. Cleo and Hercules think the event is one huge joke, knowing as they do what they intend for Hans.

But then another dwarf stands on the table and brings a loving cup to everyone gathered. They each take a sip while chanting the words that make Cleopatra a member of their community—"Gooble gobble, we accept her, one of us." When the loving cup is thrust toward Cleopatra she rises, the full horror of what they're saying dawning on her. "You. Dirty. Slimy. Freaks!" she screams, silencing the crowd.

Obviously, the party is over and soon the only ones left at the table are Hercules, Cleopatra and Hans. The drunken strong man lifts Hans from his bench and puts him on Cleo's shoulders telling the woman to give her new husband a horsey ride back to his wagon. (The movie is adapted from a short story called "Spurs" by Tod Robbins and this "horsey ride" is at the center of the original tale.)

Hans soon falls ill, but the freaks have overheard the plotting of Hercules and Cleopatra. Off screen they tell Hans what his wife and her lover are up to and one dark stormy night the freaks take their revenge.

The film ends back at the indoor sideshow. A woman looks down into the pit and screams. Then Browning shows us the nature of the freak's revenge. I won't go into any detail, but is it absurd? Oh yeah. Effective? You better believe it.

An overview of the plot, which is a standard morality/revenge tale, does nothing to prepare you for viewing the film. The cadre of freaks is made up of dwarfs, microcephalics (referred to in the movie as "pinheads"), Siamese twins, people who are armless and legless—and in one case, both—a bearded lady, an hermaphrodite, and persons the descriptions of whom are beyond my vocabulary.

The characters play their reaction to the sideshow performers several ways. Some of the normals abuse them. Some are casually cruel and some are deliberately so. Other normals befriend the freaks. Wallace Ford and Leila Hyams are Phroso the clown (a name used by Lon Chaney in Browning's silent West of Zanzibar, also with a circus background) and Venus, the bareback rider, who, while sometimes a bit patronizing, are intended to represent acceptance.

More problematic is Browning's attitude as evidenced in the film. We first see the freaks, described as "children" although several of them are anything but, frolicking on a picnic. As they skip around in a circle they look for all the world as if Browning wanted to parody the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Of course, Max Reinhardt's film of that play wouldn't be made for another three years, but the suggestion of Arcadian fantasy turned into a sick joke is inescapable.

In fact, any joke involving the freaks must come across as black humor. One of the Siamese twins, Daisy Hilton, is married to a clown (Roscoe Ates) and the second twin, Violet, becomes engaged. The two men ask each other to bring their wives over for a visit.

But sometimes the joke is used to suggest that there isn't much difference between one world and another. We first meet the half-man/half-woman Joseph Josephine as s/he strolls between the wagons and Roscoe is changing out of the costume of a Roman lady. The male/female combination is emphasized.

And occasionally the humor is just as bizarre as the visuals. When Phroso comforts Venus, who has just broken up with her boyfriend, she tells him, "Say, you're a pretty good kid." "You're darn right," he responds. "You should have caught me before my operation." Whatever that may mean.

There really isn't much of horror in this horror movie, although there is a lot of unease beginning when the freaks figure out that Hercules and Cleopatra intend to murder Hans. Everywhere the big woman turns, there are two or three of her unusual enemies watching from the shadows.

Things turn more grotesque during the climactic storm when the wagons carrying Cleopatra and Hercules tip over in the mud. One of the little men throws a knife at the strong man, dropping him and allowing several more freaks to swarm over him. Cleopatra rushes off into the woods before she is brought down. In one shot, an armless/legless man is seen squirming through the mud in pursuit of the villains. He is carrying a dagger in his mouth—but how does he intend to use it? It's a pure nightmare vision, all visceral intensity and no logic.

Originally, Browning intended a tree to fall on Cleo, thereby giving the freaks the opportunity they need to carve her up. Hercules was supposed to be seen in the epilog singing like a counter-tenor, having been emasculated. As the film now stands, Hercules is last seen being attacked. Only Cleopatra survives to become truly, "one of us."

But perhaps as shocking and horrifying as the appearance of the freaks to audiences of 1932 is the film's sexual innuendo. Cleopatra is blatantly sexual. When Hercules comes to her wagon, she offers to cook some eggs for him. She turns to him, puts her hands on her hips, thrusts her breasts toward him and asks, theoretically about the eggs, "How do you like them?"

Pre-code audiences were used to stuff like that, but they hadn't been exposed, in mainstream films at least, to the necessity of public sex when Siamese twins cohabitate with their husbands. The idea of a dwarf and a "big woman" having a sexual relationship can still generate some ribald snickering, but there's undeniably something off-putting in the mental image as well.

Part of this problem springs from the tragic gut-feeling that the freaks are somehow less than human, a delusion that the movie tries so hard to correct. But the question is: can it? Can any film move audiences completely beyond the unwanted and unwarranted notion that there is something unnaturally wrong with people who look so different?

Browning's camera jumps in and out, and tracks with the movement of the characters with a freedom he had rarely allowed himself previously. But during those last moments, when the freaks wreak their vengeance, the camera stands still, their faces lunging at us in close-up, and even the most sensitive ones among us are likely to push backward in our seats to put as much distance as possible between us and the grotesque image on the screen.

4

Cimarron (1931)

Cimarron was released in 1931 and based on the 1929 bestseller by Edna Ferber . Richard Dix stars as Yancy Cravat, based on the real life Temple Houston, son of Sam Houston. Temple was a lawyer in Woodward, OK, from 1894 to his death in 1905, and a couple of moments in the movie draw on Temple's court room style. During his defense of soiled dove Dixie Lee — a prostitute named Minnie Stacey in real life — Yancy says of his trial opponent, "Your honor, the prosecutor is the first man that I've ever seen that can strut while sitting down." His closing argument to the jury is also taken from Temple's defense of Minnie Stacey in 1899.

It's too bad Cimarron doesn't depict my favorite Temple Houston anecdote, as retold in Glenn Shirley's fine biography of the man . Once, Temple asked to use the judge's chamber as a place he and his client could talk in private. The request was granted but, after lawyer and client failed to reappear in court in a reasonable amount of time, Temple was discovered sitting alone in the room with the window wide open. "I gave him the best advice I could," Houston quipped.

Okay, all this is fun but it only comments on the movie by pointing out that much of the characterization, plot, and background are drawn from times that had passed only 30 years before the film was made. The filming of Cimarron
is much closer in time to the great Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 than it is to us today and most of the pleasure the movie delivers is due to its authenticity.

The Internet Movie Database reports that the land rush scene took a week to film, using 5,000 extras, 28 cameramen, 6 still photographers and 27 camera assistants. It holds up beautifully today and if young people watching the movie think they're seeing newsreel footage of the actual event, it's almost understandable.

The picture follows footloose Yancy and his bride Sabra (the always luminous Irene Dunne) as they travel west so Yancy can set up a newspaper and practice law. They arrive first in the bustling frontier city of Osage, one of those Insta-Cities that popped up out of the prairie after the first land run.

These early scenes in Osage are fascinating in their depiction of the noise, confusion and crowded conditions. We meet many of the human types who made the run—good guys and bad guys—but most prominently for dramatic purposes a Jewish peddler (George E. Stone, who sandwiched this picture in between Little Caesar and The Front Page), a stammering printer's devil (Roscoe Ates, perhaps best remembered as either "Soapy" Jones, Eddie Dean's sidekick in a series of B-westerns, or as the husband of one of the Hilton sisters in Freaks), and a young African-American boy, Isaiah (Eugene Jackson, Pineapple in the Our Gang series), who the Cravats discover stowed away in their wagon.

Yancy and Isaiah share a moment that is both historically interesting and charged with sentiment. Yancy and Sabra are on their way to church when they find that Isaiah is tagging along behind them and looking as Sunday-go-to-meeting as he can. The Cravats know that the congregation will not allow the youngster to enter the church, so Yancy asks a favor of him. He tells Isaiah that he'd really appreciate it if his young friend would stay behind and guard the house from potential robbers. Isaiah is proud that this father figure would entrust him with such responsibility. It's a scene that plays with the overriding racism of the frontier—and the early 1930s—and not being torn between the bigotry and the kindness of Yancy is difficult.

The movie lets us know that yonderin' fellas like Yancy, who took their brains and skills from one frontier outpost to the next, were what the west needed if it ever hoped to settle down. The tragedy for civilizers like Yancy was that they couldn't feel at home when civilization did grow roots, and they were doomed from the start to run out of room and out of time. The new state they created didn't need roughnecks and pioneers.

Cimarron was the first western to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Dix and Dunne were both nominated for Oscars, but neither took one home. About a lot of older movies you say metaphorically, "Well, that one is just an historical document," but Cimarron is special because it actually is an historical document.

Oh, and one more note about something that is neither here nor there. Sabra Cravat's mother, featured in one early scene in the movie, is played by a stage actress named Nance O'Neil. If you've ever heard of her, it probably isn't in connection with her career as an actress but for the fact that during the early 20th Century she was the best friend of the infamous Lizzie Borden. Were they really, as some folks claim, lovers? Don't axe, don't tell.

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