No pizza in this one

Another silent movie that I had to make a point of watching before it expired from my DVR was Tod Browning's The Mystic, which had a copyright date of 1925 but looked like a re-release print considering that it had what really seemed like a synchronized score. (Then again, it's possible that a new score was commissioned for a video release, although there's no modern title card mentioning this.) In any case, as I always do, I made it point to watch it before it expired so that I could write up this post on the movie.

The Mystic opens in Hungary, at a traveling circus where one of the acts is a young woman named Zara (Aileen Pringle) who is part magic act, part phony psychic, working with her father Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis) and knife-thrower Anton. The show goes from village to village (although there are some surprisingly large building from the MGM backlot in this village) with the act traveling in the 1920s equivalent of a motor home. In this village however, someone who's clearly out of place has shown up and seems to be stalking Zara. Dad and Anton are worried, although Zara doesn't seem to care.

That man turns out to be an American, Michael Nash (Conway Tearle, half-brother of Godfrey). While the magic act is a small-time phony thing and presumably everybody in the village knows it, Michael is a much bigger would-be con artist. He has an idea that would fleece people out of large sums of money, but he needs a phony psychic like Zara to pull it off. He's willing to offer everyone in the act a substantial sum of money to come to America, where they'll engage in the con that Michael has planned.

But first, they need to engage in a smaller con to get the higher society of New York to believe that Zara is really what they claim she is, and this is one of the best parts of the movie, as we see all the preparations Michael goes to to make the effects of the séance seem real. There's a way for him to eavesdrop on the room, and a baseboard panel that allows someone to get into the room where the séance is being held even though the doors are supposedly locked. Even though a police inspector (character actor DeWitt Jennings) shows up with the express intention of debunking things, he's not able too and things go off well enough for the con artists.

Well enough, in fact, that they get the impression of wealthy heiress Doris Merrick and her guardian Bradshaw who is managing the trust that holds Doris' wealth. Michael's plan is to gain Doris' confidence so that he can get the bonds and other securities that comprise Doris' wealth. But things don't go quite as planned for a bunch of reasons, in part because with all that money there's bound to be jealousy over who gets how much, and in part because the authorities are on the case. Several guns are involved, and there's also Anton's prowess at knife-throwing that's finally a useful part of the plot.

Tod Browning's movies are always interesting for how shocking they try to be. Unfortunately, The Mystic is hampered by a Hollywood ending that I can't help but think wasn't Browning's idea but that of somebody at MGM. The story up until the climax works fairly well, with the best part being the special effects, and the way we more or less get to see how they were created because the creation of those effects is an important plot point. Despite the flaws, The Mystic is still a movie that's worth a watch.

The Invisible Ray

TCM unsurprisingly ran a bunch of horror films last October. One that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from my DVR was The Invisible Ray. Having finally watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts to post at a suitable time.

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Rukh, an astronomer living in what is probably Romania together whith his blind mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) and his wife Diana (Frances Drake), who is the daughter of Rukh's deceased scientific partner. Rukh has supposedly come across some great scientific discovery, involving looking at distant galaxies as a way of seeing Earth's own past. It's a hypothesis that brings researcher Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) in from the more civilized parts of Europe together with his sponsors, the British Sir Francis Stevens and his wife Lady Stevens (Beulah Bondi) together with their nephew Drake (Frank Lawton).

Rukh's experiments appear to show that a meteorite hit Earth in what is now Africa some time in the planet's distant past, and that this impact produced something that people in the movie call "Element Radium X". Now, at the time the movie was made, radiation therapy was in its infancy; people knew about radium and how the Curies discovered it as well as how it killed Marie. But the movie extrapolates from that into a bunch of stuff that's factual nonsense albeit entertaining nonsense. In any case, since the source of Radium X is in Africa, everybody goes off to Africa to find it.

During the expedition, Dr. Rukh separates from everybody else mostly because the rest of the cast is as much interested in doing charity work performing medical services on the natives while Rukh is obsessed with finding that Radium X. Rukh does find the meteorite, but it comes at a cost. He gets some form or radiation poisoning which results in his having a "deah touch" in that if he touches anybody else, it quickly kills them. Benet is the only person he can tell, and Benet comes up with some sort of, if not antidote, at least a treatment that will temporarily stop the effects of Radium X.

Meanwhile, Rukh also learns that during the expedition, his wife has fallen in love with Drake, which is none too surprising considering that she pretty much only married Rukh out of convenience sinces she was stuck in eastern Europe when her father died. But apparently another effect of Radium X poisoning is insane jealousy.

Everybody returns to Paris, and Dr. Rukh's plan is to kill the rest of the people in the expedition as a form of revenge. After all, all he has to do is stop taking Benet's antidote and he'll just be able to touch them and render them really quite dead. He even fakes his own death to aid in this. But Benet is no dummy, and after a couple of murders he figures out what's going on and comes up with a way to lure the supposedly dead Rukh out of hiding for the climax....

In terms of science, The Invisible Ray is a bunch of nonsense. But it's very entertaining nonsense, thanks in large part to the acting of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Thanks as well to the Production Code, you know where the movie is going to end up, but it's still an enjoyable watch.

Kirk Douglas, Mafioso

Kirk Douglas played a gangster in Out of the Past. Twenty years later, he would go back to the world of organized crime, this time as an Italian-American in the more modern Mob. That film, The Brotherhood, ran on TCM some time back, so I recorded it and watched it.

Vince Genetta (Alex Cord) is on an Alitalia flight to Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily. He gets off the plane looking for his brother, Frank (Kirk Douglas), who has of course sent representatives to pick Vince up. Well, not quite, since Frank doesn't know Vince is coming but has been expecting someone from America. And the men Frank has sent to the airport call Frank up to warn him of this visitor before taking Vince to a pre-determined rendezvous point.

Of course, as my introduction gave away, although it wouldn't take too much guessing even if you didn't know the plot of the movie, Frank is a member of the Mob who has fled America for the ancestral home of Italy out of a fear that some rival mobster is going to put a hit on him. Frank is happy to see his brother, although as his wife Ida (Irene Papas in a criminally underused role) points out, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Vince could be the one the Mob sent over to get Frank. At this point Frank starts to think back to how things arrived at this point....

Vince was a college man who also served some time in the Army. He's finally been demobbed and, on meeting Frank again, informs Frank that he wants to go into "the business", meaning that he wants to be part of the Mafia family branch that Frank is the head of ever since Dad was rubbed out in a hit. Vince is also going to be getting married to Emma Bertolo (Susan Strasberg), head of another Mafia Don, Dom Bertolo (Luther Adler).

Frank is one of those people who believes in the old style of mobbing up, which means things like flashy hits, or at least stylized enough that they serve as a clear warning to other people who might cross him. As an example he has a couple of goons kill a guy in a brownfield site and stuff a bird in the guys mouth: don't be a stool pigeon. However, Mafia ways are changing. The Italians are beginning to work more with the Irish and the Jews, making democratic decisions among a board meeting of sorts. They want to diversify, doing things like buying up small defense contractors in new technologies like electronics, with the plan of bilking the government out of what would be tens of billions today. (Perhaps opening learing centers might have been more efficient.) Frank isn't so sure of this, because directly scamming the feds seems to him like a bad idea.

Frank's old ways alarm the other bosses, while Vinnie sets out to work as an accountant who can come up with two sets of books to minimize what they pay to the government, getting him in good with the other bosses. But Frank's really going to alarm the others when he comes into more direct conflict with them, learning about just how his family's branch of the Mob has become less influential. Now, as we already know from the beginning, Frank has decamped to Italy, which means something is going to happen to make Frank think that's a good idea. What that something is, and what Vince's role with his brother is, are things that I don't want to spoil.

The Brotherhood is another one of those movies that's got a really good idea behind it, but where the execution falls a bit flat. I think part of that is the flashback structure: we already know Frank is on the outs as the movie opens, which is a bit too much to reveal, I think. It also doesn't help that Alex Cord is a fairly wooden actor who's being asked to play a cipher. Kirk Douglas tries, but he's also not a particularly sympathetic character here. I'm glad, however, that I got the chance to see The Brotherhood, even if it's not the best film out there.

The attic around toys

I think I've mentioned quite a few times in the past that Southern Gothic is not one of my favorite genres of movies, in part because of how "loud" the movies are, and even more because they tend to be full of characters for whom it's difficult to have any sympathy. In any case, another Southern Gothic movie was on my DVR and getting a TCM airing at the end of Gene Tierney's day in Summer Under the Stars: Toys in the Attic, early tomorrow (August 10) at 4:15 AM.

Carrie (Geraldine Page) and Anna (Wendy Hiller) Berniers are a pair of sisters living together in the old family house in New Orleans, neither of them ever having apparently married. They've got an itinerant brother Julian (Dean Martin) who's gone north, supposedly to earn money, although the source of the money is a big point of discussion over the course of the movie. In any case, Julian is expected to return to New Orleans as the movie opens together with his new bride Lily (Yvette Mimieux).

Except that Julian is already in New Orleans, holed up at a hotel with Lily with the hotel owner expecting him to pay off a substantial bill. Julian has business to attend to with Cyrus Warkins, the nature of which will be revealed later in the movie. But the business ends with Julian in possession of a very thick envelope full of cash, which Julian in an incredibly stupid move does not deposit into a bank account.

Julian arrives at the old family home, bringing a whole bunch of gifts since one of the things the two sisters had hoped for was to be able to take a trip to Europe together. However, the sisters wonder about the source of the money, with one theory being that Julian was paid to marry Lily. Lily, you see, is the sort of woman who acts as though she's never going to grow emotionally beyond being an adolescent: she's physically marriageable, but not mentally. The two Berniers sisters even ask Lily's mother Albertine (that's Gene Tierney) directly about it.

There's also the suggestion that Julian earned that money by selling a factory up in Chicago, which he may well have done although he probably didn't earn that much money. He's also been way too profligate with the money he does have, the way that some poor people who win the lottery spend themselves into bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Julian has also been seeing Cyrus' wife Charlotte, who as it turns out also has something to do with the money that Julian got although that's only going to be revealed later in the movie. But continuing to see her after Julian's got married to Lily is now going to be twice the issue: where it might only have been a problem with Cyrus, now there's Lily to worry about too. And Carrie, who seems to look up to Julian much more than Anna does. This warped relationship is ultimately going to lead to the climax of the movie....

There's a lot in Toys in the Attic that I can't really mention since it would give away too much information. But let's just say that Toys in the Attic is an overheated movie. Julian comes across as a dishonest grifter. Lily and Carrie are both obnoxious blankety-blanks who deserve to be slapped. Anna is the closest to a sensible person, but even she is not quite a prize. The crazy plot and unlikable characters make Toys in the Attic a difficult movie to warm up to.

But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Die Mörder sind unter uns

Every now and then, Eddie Muller dips into foreign films for his Noir Alley segment, leading to films that I'm likely not to have seen as well as a glut of foreign films on my DVR that I have to get through before they expire. One such foreign film was one of the earliest to be made in Germany after the end of World War II, The Murderers Are Among Us.

It's Berlin in 1945, not long after the defeat of the Nazis, with the city largely in ruins and people having to resort to various means, not necessarily ethical, to survive. Among the people returning to Berlin is Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhem Borchert), who had worked as a doctor before the war but who was clearly scarred by his war experiences that will be revealed later in the movie. He gets an apartment in a building that was less badly damaged than some others: it seems to have four walls, but a lot of the windows are broken.

What he doesn't know is that the previous occupant of the apartment is still alive. Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) was sent to a concentration camp for reasons not mentioned, although I'd guess it's political rather than being Jewish. She survived the war and expects that she might be able to return to her old apartment, only to find that Mertens has taken the apartment. With the housing crunch, it's not as though there are a lot of apartments out there, so the two agree to live together.

It's not long before Susanne finds a letter addressed to a Mrs. Brückner, which was written by Mr. Brückner and is only to be delivered to her in case of the husband's death. Obviously Mertens had served with Brückner in the war and was supposed to give that letter had Brückner died, only for Mertens never to hear of Brückner's death. With the war over, Susanne figures that Brücker probably died and that perhaps it would be a good idea for her to deliver the letter to Mrs. Brückner by hand.

However, what Susanna finds is that Mr. Brücker survived the war, and is making a reasonably good living in what is effectively the scrap metal industry, taking old military helmets and turning them into cookware. (One would guess that Brückner was of a fairly high social class before the war although this isn't quite mentioned.) Susanne returns home and tells Mertens that Brückner actually survived, something that will probably relieve Mertens.

However, Mertens is decidedly unhappy about this. It turns out that Brückner was involved with whatever it is that gave Mertens that emotional scarring, and in a bad way. Mertens, upon learning that Brücker is actually very much alive and doing quite well for himself, decides that Brückner needs justice, and that the only way for that justice to be meted out is if Mertens does it himself.

The Murderers Are Among Us is an interesting movie, partly on its own merits and partly for the atmosphere in which the movie was made. Germany was of course occupied in early 1946 when the movie was made, and for better or worse the occupying powers influenced how the film was made. This means that the director couldn't get the ending he wanted. However, the movie is filmed on location in Berlin, with all the ruins and deprivation that the city was facing in 1946. That alone is worth the price of admission. Never mind that the movie is pretty good despite the problems the ending has.

The Murderers Are Among Us is absolutely worth a watch.

Good Morning, Eve!

One of the shorts that TCM ran as part of the Saturday morning block was the early three-strip Technicolor short Good Morning, Eve!.

Leon Errol stars as Adam, looking much too old and certainly not the stereotypically handsome sort or Adam you'd see in other Bible-themed movies. Of course, he's in the Garden of Eden with Eve (June MacCloy), and is tempted with a bite of the apple.

This time, however, the apple sends them out of paradise, if you will, by going on a tour of history. This is an excuse for some sight gags since Adam and Eve are people out of place, as well as an excuse for musical numbers since that's the sort of thing audiences back in 1934 would have loved.

Adam and Eve make a stop in ancient Rome under Nero (Vernon Dent), who is holding some sort of musical competition that allows Adam and Eve to enter since Nero is bored of the traditional competition where he's always declared the winner. There's also a rural-style quartet from the days before it was commonly called country music.

Second is a stop in the England of King Arthur, four years before Warner Bros. made The Adventures of Robin Hood. Finally, Adam and Eve make it to the present, and a beach full of nubile young women in bathing suits, before the ending that reveals....

There is naturally very little plot to Good Morning, Eve!. The humor is dad joke level, but the audiences would have been OK with such dumb humor around the musical numbers. What is the most interesting about the short is that it's one the earliest live-action examples of three-strip Technicolor, coming after maybe Service With a Smile and La Cucaracha as far as shorts completely in the new process. The print TCM showed is excellent, with stunning color:

Briefs for August 7-8, 2026

A bit of the TCM schedule for September is available, and it looks as though there's already one movie on the schedule that I'd written up a post for recently and scheduled for in between now and when it's going to air, so I've got to move a bunch of stuff around since if I can schedule a post on a movie in conjunction with when it's going to air (or, less frequently, FXM), I like to do that. Once again, however, as always, check a listings site yourself, since my writing up posts some time in advance tends to make me do double takes over whether I've scheduled them on the right day.

Today in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of movies with Basil Rathbone, while tomorrow is given over to Steve McQueen, including the first version of The Thomas Crown Affair at 6:00 PM. It got a remake in the 1990s, of course, and apparently there's going to be a third version coming out next year, starring Michael B. Jordan. Not that I'm likely to watch it since I don't go to the movie theater very often. As I think I've stated, our local sixtyplex is in a dead mall which I think is down to about the theater and Target, which was only attached to the mall at some later date. It's depressing to go there, and the service roads are badly maintained.

There's actually a couple of movies in the FXM rotation that I've got on my DVR but haven't watched or written up posts about, and they're coming up in the near future: Wee Willie Winkie at 7:20 AM August 9 as part of a morning of Shirley Temple movies, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln a couple of times next week. I have to admit part of the reason I haven't gotten around to watching them is that I'm always a couple of weeks ahead in my post scheduling, and besides, FXM repeats stuff often enough that I can keep seeing it if I missed the previous airing. The one FXM movie on my DVR that doesn't seem to be repeating is Anastasia, which I've mentioned in passing a few times but never actually done a full-length post on.

Today is the birth anniversary of actress Billie Burke (born 1884), who is probably best known for playing Glinda, the good witch, in the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz although I always think of her as Lionel Barrymore's wife in Dinner at Eight. It's also the birth anniversary of Ann Harding (born 1901). That reminds me that I really need to get around to watching the 1930 version of Holiday, if it's still available on demand at Tubi. I noticed that among the films to put in my Tubi library ages ago, and rarely get around to watching anything from it.

The Arnelo Affair

I mentioned a few months back that I somehow wound up with a whole bunch of movies starring George Murphy on my DVR, not from a programming theme of his movies. Another of the movies was The Arnelo Affair, which I watched and wrote of this post that I could schedule at a suitable time after other posts on Murphy's movies.

Murphy is technically the second male lead here, and we don't see him at first. Instead, we see the female lead, Frances Gifford, who plays Ann Parkson. Ann is in a car with Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), and in a voiceover talking about how much she regrets this. And how she wishes her husband had never brought this guy home. So, as you might be able to guess, we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, to the time when Ann's husband Ted (that's George Murphy) brought Tony Arnelo home.

Ted is a Chicago lawyer who's trying to advance his career, and one of his clients is nightclub owner Arnelo, whom Ted is representing in a bunch of tax-related stuff. Ann and Tony have a kid, Ricky (a young Dean Stockwell), and a seemingly wonderful life, except that Ted is spending a lot of time on his work, to the point that he can't take Ann out for a night out on the town with friends like upstairs neighbor and couturier Vivian Delwyn (Eve Arden). But Tony shows up, and he immediately starts telling Ann how striking she looks. When he learns that Ann has a hobby of interior decoration, Tony offers her the chance to make a bit of money by decorating some of his places.

Ann being a bored housewife, she decides to take Tony up on the offer. However, she quickly learns that Tony is really interested in her for other reasons, and that she's not the only woman he's interested in. He's also seeing a local actress named Claire Lorrison who shows up one afternoon when Ann thinks she's going to be alone with Tony. Worse, Tony starts smacking Claire around, leading Ann to want to break off the relationship with Tony. Tony, for his part, is rather persistent, constantly calling Ann up.

Things take an even worse turn when Claire winds up dead, clearly quite murdered. Ann is innocent of the murder, although not necessarily of adultery, which is still an issue under the Production Code. But Tony being a nasty piece of work, he's able to blackmail Ann by making certain that the dead Claire is found with a compact that has a big letter A that can likely be traced back to Ann. But of course, since there's that Production Code, we know that the real murderer has to be caught and get his just desserts.

I can see why all the people involved in The Arnelo Affair might want to be involved with it, but the final result is something that's rather a misfire. If I had to guess why, I think that it feels like it's devoid of emotion. George Murphy isn't a very charismatic actor at the best of times, and he's certainly very much a second banana here. Tony Arnelo may be a piece of work, but Hodiak doesn't give off that vibe. And Gifford is a bit of a cipher too. The Dean Stockwell character is somewhat superfluous. And, not that it has anything to do with the movie itself, the print TCM ran looked like one of those older 16mm prints that TV stations would run of old public-domain movies.

Manhattan Murder Mystery

Tomorrow, August 6, is Diane Keaton day in this year's installment of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. Since Keaton died late last year and TCM had a programming tribute to her, this gave me the opportunity to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that I recorded that's part of her day tomorrow is Manhattan Murder Mystery, airing at 4:00 PM.

Keaton plays Carol Lipton, married to Manhattan editor Larry Lipton (Woody Allen) and living in a nice Manhattan apartment. One night, she agrees to go to a hockey game on the grounds that Larry will then go with her to the opera, a sign that there might be a bit of tension in their marriage. As they get home, on the elevator up to the apartment they meet some neighbors they haven't met before, Paul (Jerry Adler) and Lillian (Lynn Cohen) House. The Houses invite Larry and Carol over for a nightcap, and the two couples seem to get along moderately well.

That all changes the following night when Carol and Larry return from the opera, only to find the paramedics there. It seems Lillian has suddenly died of a massive heart attack. Not that there's much that Carol and Larry can do to console the old guy, who in any case thinks that perhaps he should take a vacation to Florida to go visit his brother and do a bit of snorkeling.

Some time later, Carol, who was already revealed to be a good cook, decides to bring over some dessert to cheer up Paul. He happily lets Carol and Larry in, but when Carol goes to put on a pot of coffee to have with dessert, she can't find the percolator. In one of the cabinets, she finds... an urn with Lillian's ashes! This surprises Carol, not only because it seems like a slightly odd place to keep a cremation urn, but also because Paul and Lillian had mentioned having bought a pair of cemetery plots up in Rockland County to be buried in. My first thought was that it's not uncommon in places with family plots for people to be cremated and have the ashes interred in the family plot/crypt.

This, however, is not Carol's first thought. She has a feeling that Paul must have been lying about the plots up in Rockland County; that, combined with a cremation that precludes any sort of autopsy, suggests to Carol that perhaps Lillian could have been murdered! So what does Carol do? She tells her and Larry's friend Ted (Alan Alda) about this, and gets the bright idea that perhaps one day while she knows that Paul is out of the apartment she can get the superintendent's key and search Paul's apartment for evidence proving that Lillian did not in fact die of natural causes.

This is understandably a crazy idea for poor Larry. But he keeps getting dragged further and further into things, as Carol discovers one inconsistency after another that only strengthens her belief that Paul in fact killed Lillian. And dammit, like a 1930s husband/wife comic murder mystery movie, she's going to investigate until she gets to the real truth!

Complicating things are a pair of possibly romantic subplots. Since Ted is more willing to believe Carol than Larry is, Larry gets the impression that perhaps there's something romantic going on between Ted and Carol. Larry, meanwhile, is working on the newest book from client Marcia (Anjelica Huston), so Carol starts to wonder whether perhaps Larry has some sort of romantic involvement with Marcia. Eventually, the four team together when the evidence that there really was a murder becomes too strong to ignore.

Frankly, the plot of Manhattan Murder Mystery is, like a lot of the 1930s mysteries, wildly unrealistic. You're going to have to suspend a lot of disbelief here. However, the movie is decidedly well made. I think it's going to appeal more to fans of Woody Allen than the more casual movie fan, but it's not hard to see why it got mostly positive reviews upon its release.

That Glenn Ford version of Cimarron again

Edna Ferber's novel Cimarron was famously made into a motion picture not long after its publication, and that version is notorious for winning the Best Picture Oscar for RKO where time has been extremely unkind to the movie. Somewhere along the way MGM got the rights to the book. After RKO closed up shop, and after MGM's own best days had gone by, a second version of Cimarron made it to the screen. That version airs early tomorrow morning, or overnight tonight if you wish to look at it that way, at 3:30 AM.

Glenn Ford stars as Yancey Cravat, and despite the opening title cards going on about the first (1889) land rush in what is now the state of Oklahoma, we don't actually get to the rush for about a half hour. Instead, we have to hear Yancey talk about how this land rush is going to be the biggest thing in history, along with meeting Yancey's new bride Sabra (Maria Schell). She seems to be from fairly well-to-do immigrant stock, and her parents are none too happy with her marriage to a man they barely know and who is going to take her away to some god-forsaken place.

We also meet a couple of other people who are going to take part in the land rush. The Wyatts (Arthur O'Connell and Mercedes McCambridge) are the parents of a large family. Dixie Lee (Anne Baxter) knows just the piece of land that Yancey wants in Oklahoma, and has no qualms about beating Yancey to it and claiming it for her own, even though there's no way she can farm that much land. And then there are the Peglers (Robert Keith and Aline MacMahon). Mr. Pegler was the publisher of a newspaper in Texas, together with his printer Jesse (Harry Morgan, oddly credited as "Henry 'Harry' Morgan" despite already having some credits as Harry). Unfortunately, in the land rush, Mr. Pegler gets trampled to death, and the Cravats wind up as owners of a newspaper.

It's one step on the way to the family becoming wealthy, but that's not going to be an easy road. For one thing, there's a lot of prejudice in Oklahoma. Some of it is towards a Jewish merchant, Sol Levy (David Opatoshu), although Sabra doesn't have any issues with him, repeatedly going to him to ask to borrow money. Somewhat surprisingly is that Sabra has a lot of problems with the Cherokees who have populated the area ever since being forcibly relocated there by Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears. Imagine Sabra's horror when her kid marries a Cherokee near the end of the movie.

The other problem is that Yancey just can't stay in one place. He's always searching for the Next Big Thing which in some ways would be admirable, if it weren't for the fact that that next thing isn't something that can be achieved in the same location. Heck, that's why he took part in the first land rush. He takes part in another one in what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, and goes off to join the armed forces first for the Spanish-American War and then for the Great War fighting for France. This latter even though his character would be past 50 by this point.

Yancey also has adventures involving dealing with a couple of outlaws, as well as being asked by old friend Mr. Wyatt, himself wealthy from swindling the Cherokees out of oil rights, to become governor when the territory is about to become a state. Yancey just can't do it, which brings us to another half-hour of adventure.

Part of the problem with this version of Cimarron is that it runs nearly two and a half hours, and boy does it seem slow. The story also doesn't feel all that coherent, but like a series of vignettes in a bad way. The one thing the film has going for it is some nice cinematography, but that's not enough to save it.