We’re just getting all the “firsts” for each movie genre out of the way, I guess, because Cimarron (1931, RKO Radio) holds the honor of being the first western to win Best Picture. This is also our first film to really grab a good chunk of Academy Award nominations for its particular movie season (1930-31). Along with its studio’s nomination for Best Sound Recording, Cimarron was nominated for seven Academy Awards—Outstanding Production, Best Directing, Best Actor, Best Actress, Art Direction, Cinematography, and Writing (Adaptation)—and took home three Oscars. In addition to nabbing the year’s highest honor of Outstanding Production, the film also won for its screenplay and its art direction. The remake of the film in 1960 was also nominated for two Academy Awards—Best Art Direction (Set Decoration, Color) and Best Sound—neither of which it won.

Like All Quiet on the Western Front, Cimarron is an adaptation of an extremely popular novel of the same name. Published in 1929 by Edna Ferber, who had also penned Show Boat (1926) and who, incidentally, was born in my home state of Michigan (Go Blue!), Cimarron was the best-selling novel of 1930. Focusing on the settling and development of the State of Oklahoma (as well as the development of the characters who do the settling), the timing of Cimarron’s release in both novel and film forms is remarkable.

A snapshot of conditions in Texas County, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl

Enter the Dust Bowl. Beginning in 1930, a combination of drought and overuse of land led to horrific desert-like conditions in the Great Plains. Oklahoma and its inhabitants suffered greatly—as did much of the rest of the United States during the Great Depression that continued on through much of the 1930s. Infamously chronicled in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), many “Okies” fled Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl in an attempt to reach the “promised land” of California in search of a more sustainable existence. It is fascinating that Ferber’s book and its film were both released around the beginning of this exodus from the same place that Cimarron’s characters strive so hard to enter and “civilize.”

For more detailed thoughts on Cimarron and its significance, please check out the full post this weekend!