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.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

Tomorrow, February 13 is the start of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, with the schedule looking like it's being done by themes this year. The first morning starts off with several fantasy-type movies, with different types of fantasic material. Among the movies is The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, at 7:45 AM.

Now, as you probably know, brothers Wilhelm (played here by Laurence Harvey) and Jakob (played by Karlheinz Böhm) Grimm were a pair of brothers in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the 19th century who today are best known for their compilations of fairy tales from various parts of the German-language area. (Remember also that Germany was not a unified country at this time.) They did more, however, such as write books on German grammar and start an etymological dictionary of German, in part because it took a while for the fairy tale books to sell. The original versions of the tales, after all, were decidedly dark and not quite for children.

In this version of their lives, the two are working for a duke (Oscar Homolka) who is interested in having a biography of his family line written because the duke wishes to impress the king of Prussia. This at least gives the two brothers and Wilhelm's wife Dorothea (Claire Bloom) a place to stay while they're trying to sell their other books at Stossel's (Walter Slezak) book store. Meanwhile, a wealthier family from closer to Berlin comes to visit with adult daughter Greta (Barbara Eden), who falls in love with Jakob except that Jakob and especially Wilhelm are too much into those fairy tales.

That backstory takes up about half of the movie, with the other half consisting of three fairy tales -- lesser-known ones, which was a deliberate choice on the part of the moviemakers because they wanted stories the audience would be less likely to know the ending to, as well as many of the better-known ones already having been done by Disney. This also enabled the moviemakers to have a cast with a lot of guest stars if you will, each of whom only appeared in one of the stories. The first one, which Wilhelm tells to his own children, is The Dancing Princess. Jim Backus plays a king with a daughter (Yvette Mimieux) who loves to dance at night. Russ Tamblyn plays a man who, with the help of an invisibility cloak, is abble to discover the daughter's secret.

Later, Wilhelm wants to convince his publisher that there are people out there who would buy the books, so he brings in a bunch of kids and tells them the story of The Cobbler and the Elves about a cobbler (Harvey himself) whose elves come to life at night, aided by the special effects of George Pal.

Finally, as part of a plot point that has the brothers traveling to get information on an obscure branch of the family, Wilhelm runs into an old lady in the middle of the woods (Martita Hunt) who tells the story of The Singing Bone. Nobleman Sir Ludwig (Terry-Thomas) and his servant Hans (Buddy Hackett) find a magical dragon in a cave, with Hans killing the dragon. Ludwig tries to take credit for it, but the titular singing bone tells the real truth of what happened.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed in Cinerama, and the print TCM ran is in the "smilebox" format which is supposed to simulate the curved screen that the Cinerama movies were originally projected onto. To me, it's always seemed as though the smilebox is a bit too exaggerated. Yes, there was some curvature, and people would mostly be farthest away from the middle section (considering vertical sections) of the screen, but the photographs I've seen don't look as curved as what the smilebox gives us. Cinerama also had serious issues where panoramas looked good -- and the location photography here is quite good -- but not suited to the sorts of closeups needed for traditional narrative storytelling. The "real life" sequences here are by far the weakest part of the movie. Ultimately, we get a bit too much of the back-story to be really interesting to children. That's a shame, because the three fairy tales aren't that bad.

So overall, I think The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is an ambitious project that falls a bit short of its intended goal, but a movie that's still worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

TCM Star of the Month September 2025: Peter Sellers

Careful readers of this blog (not that there are many) will note that I didn't do a post last week on the new TCM Star of the Month for September 2025. That's because, for whatever, reason, this month's Star gets four nights in prime time but TCM didn't want to program that on Wednesday or Thursday. So we finally get to the new Star of the Month tonight. That star is Peter Sellers, whose films will be on TCM tonight and each of the following three Mondays. I have one of his movies sitting on my DVR: Tom Thumb, which shows up overnight tonight (or early tomorrow morning depending upon your point of view) at 3:15 AM.

Technically, this isn't Sellers' movie, as he plays a supporting role, in the opening credits as one of "the villains" alongside Terry-Thomas. The real star here is Russ Tamblyn, who plays the titular role of the extremely tiny person. But we don't meet him for several minutes. Instead we meet forest dweller Jonathan (Bernard Miles), who lives a seemingly happy life out in the forest with his wife Anne, except for the fact they don't have children. One day as Jonathan is about to chop down a tree, he's stopped by the Forest Queen, who offers him three wishes in exchange for not chopping down the tree. Jonathan and his wife stupidly use up those wishes but granted a fourth, which is for the child they never had. That's where Tom comes in, mature but not grown up, or at least as grown up as he's going to be, with all of this being a perfect opportunity for special effects work, since the movie ws directed by George Pal.

Meanwhile, Woody (Alan Young) is a friend of Jonathan and Anne's as well as a performer in a traveling band. Jonathan sees the Forest Queen and falls in love with her, except that she's immortal. Or at least she is until Woody kisses her, which as you might guess is finally going to come at the beginning of the movie. Woody takes Tom to the carnival, and Tom gets transported by balloon to the top of one of the castle's towers.

On that tower are the Villains, Antony (Sellers) and Ivan (Terry-Thomas). They're trying to steal the gold that's in a locked vault in the treasury in the castle. Except that somehow, the vault has a ridiculously high ceiling with a grate at the top which just happens to be on the tower where Antony and Ivan are. They come up with an obvious lie that the naïve Tom accepts about the gold being misused as it was supposed to be for orphans. So they get him to help them steal one bag, since he's the only human who can fit through the grate. The folks in the castle do inventory and find one bag of gold coins missing, so they go out looking for it. When the one coin Ivan and Antony gave Tom is found in a bowl of porridge, Jonathan and Anne are put on trial for the theft. It's up to Tom and Woody to save the day and give us the requisite happy ending.

We know we're going to get that happy ending because for the most part the movie has had a light tone. That, and it's Hollywood. So even though it's based on a fairy tale compiled by the Grimm brothers, and many of the tales they compiled were surprisingly dark and violent, we're not getting that. What we do get is a movie that, even close to 70 years on, is going to appeal to children. They won't mind the special effects that seem primitive by today's standards, or the backlot production values. That doesn't mean that it's a bad movie or that adults will be bored by it, although it is a fairly simple story with not much going on and a running time padded by musical numbers and stop-motion photography.

Take the High Ground!

TCM's annual Memorial Day Weekend marathon of war-themed movies began yesterday evening, and I have to admit to not noticing that there was a movie on today that's currently sitting on my DVR. In any case, I've got a movie airing tomorrow that's on my DVR, so I watched that instead: Take the High Ground!. It shows up tomorrow, May 25, at 5:15 PM.

The opening credits have a scene that could either be combat in Korea, or else training for what new recruits might have faced when they went over to Korea. Except that the movie was made in 1953, by which time the active fighting in Korea had ended. Not that that really matters, since the movie can be judged as a basic training movie regardless of the time in which is was set and made.

After the credits, a train shows up at Ft. Bliss, in west Texas, and a new crop of fresh-fased recruits (most likely draftees since we still had a peacetime draft in those days) gets off the train. They're met by two sergeants: Thorne Ryan (Richard Widmark) and Laverne Holt (Karl Malden). Also there are platoons of soldiers who have finished basic and are showing off how good the training was as they're able to march in formation and other fun stuff like that.

The new soldiers are, of course, a disparate lot, ranging from men who aren't certain they're cut out to be in Uncle Sam's army to sarcastic know-it-alls who need that attitude smacked out of them except that the drill sergeants are for good reason not allowed to smack the soldiers under them as we learned in Patton. Also, as you might guess, the two drill sergeants are opposites in personality, although I wouldn't be surprised if some bright officer higher up figured out that pairing a "good cop" and a "bad cop" would be a good way to handle basic training.

As for those two sergeants, both of them had served over in Korea before being sent stateside to run basic training. Holt is OK with that, but Ryan seems to be the sort of soldier who wants to fight, not train, and is bitter about being here at Fort Bliss. And don't you know he's going to let that show. In addition to this subplot, there's another one about the sergeants meeting a nice girl Julie (Elaine Stewart) at a bar and one of them falling in love with her.

Basic training rumbles on, and the recruits go through pretty much every trope you can think of in a movie about basic training, with even one of them planning to go "over the hill". Among the recruits are Russ Tamblyn, Steve Forrest, and Carleton Carpenter. As you also might guess, the recruits eventuall do seem to become good soldiers, although I don't think they ever wind up going to fight anywhere since the armistice in Korea will have been signed by the time they could get over there.

Take the High Ground! is a competent enough movie, helped out a lot by the location shooting and color photography, but boy if it isn't formulaic with pretty much every issue facing recruits and the sergeants training them showing up. I've also read reviews from people who served in the army well after 1953 saying that their experiences of basic training were not like what's presented on screen here. I'm not a military person so I have no idea what it was really like.

If you have 100 minutes to spend on a rainy day, I suppose you could do worse than Take the High Ground!. But at the same time, you could certainly do better too.

Out west with Stewart Granger

When you think of stars whom you wouldn't necessarily think of as doing westerns, there are any number that come to mind, although I think more stars from the studio era did at least one western at some point in their careers than you might realize. Stewart Granger, who was good enough in all those British-set costume pieces did a couple of westerns over the course of his career, including The Last Hunt.

The movie is set in the Dakota Territory in the mid-1880s. Opening titles inform us that before Europeans started pushing westward past the Mississippi, there were millions of buffalo roaming the Great Plains, although by the 1880s, hunting by both the Indians and the whites had pushed that number down to the four-figure range. Stewart Granger plays Sandy McKenzie, a former buffalo hunter who turned rancher after the hunting ceased being good and he tired of the killing. Unfortunately, there are still just enough buffalo left to stampede his cattle, leaving him in need of a way to make money.

Enter Charles Gilson, played by Robert Taylor. He served in the Civil War and decided to go west and hunt buffalo after the War because he discovered he had a taste for shooting things dead and was good at it. Charles needs a crew for the next buffalo hunt, and Sandy reluctantly joins because he needs the money. In town, they're able to find two more men to round out the crew. Woodfoot (Lloyd Nolan) is a good mule hand, while Jimmy (Russ Tamblyn) is mixed race but for whatever reason has decided he's going to thrown in his lot with the white man instead of his Sioux half.

It's not going to be an easy hunt, and not only because of the dwindling number of buffalo out there in the wild. The Sioux aren't happy that the white man has been killing off the buffalo, in part because the Sioux need the buffalo to survive just as much, if not more, as the white man does. The Sioux also have religious beliefs surrounding albino buffaloes, so when Charley kills one of those, the Sioux are really displeased. In trying to gain revenge on the Indians, Charley enters the reservation and takes a young Indian woman (Debra Paget) hostage.

The bigger issue, however, is the way that Charley likes killing and Sandy no longer does. This personality clash is going to grow bigger as Sandy gets the distinct impression that Charley is getting too violent for his own good. To that end, Sandy gets the idea that perhaps he should try to save the Indian woman by taking her away from Charley and the buffalo hunting party, but that's only going to make Charley more jealous and lead to the ultimate climax.

The Last Hunt is a competently-made movie, helped out in no small part by the location shooting as well as the assistance of the Department of the Interior who allowed MGM to shoot real footage of a buffalo cull since the herds rebounded by the time the movie was made to a number where the herds had to be managed. The color and widescreen photography really help the location shooting. Unfortunately, the story is only serviceable. It's not a bad story by any means, but there have been a lot of better western stories put to screen.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

I've mentioned before that musicals aren't my favorite genre of movies, in part because they're even more artificial than other movies in that nobody just breaks out into song like that in real life. Never mind that I don't always care for the voices of the singers. So I have to admit that as a result I've put off watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for a while. It was on TCM last month, and is on again tomorrow, January 16, at 6:00 PM, so I've finally gotten around to watching it to do a full-length review.

A title card just after the opening credits informs us that the action is set in the Oregon Territory, 1850. Adam Pontipee (Howard Keel) is a farmer out in the backwoods who has come into town in part because he's in want of a wife. Outside one of those hotel/restaurants you see in old westerns, he meets Milly (Jane Powell). Seeing the way she can handle the rough men who pass through town, he realizes she can handle life on a farm, and so almost immediately proposes to her. This is a rather shocking idea, but back in those days it wasn't as if there was much way for men and women to meet, so she takes him up on the marriage proposal.

It's only when the two of them get back to the farm that Adam informs Milly that he's got six brothers, all of whom work the farm with him. Amazingly, none of the brothers gets jealous and tries to do anything inappropriate with Milly, at least not in the way you'd think of men doing in a place where there's only one woman around. But they are uncouth, not having had the civilizing presence of a woman around, and poor Milly has to try to civilize them.

The brothers go to a barn raising, which is an excuse for the big dance number in the film and the number that everybody remembers with good reason. More importantly, however, its a chance for the brothers to be around women, and for them to cotton on to the idea that they need wives as well. However, they come up with a rather dumb way of trying to find themselves wives. As winter is setting in, they go into town and look for the women they met at the dance... and basically kidnap the women to bring them back to the farm for a marriage ceremony. And they set off an avalanche on the way back so that the women's angry fathers and brothers won't be able to follow them until spring, which will give the women time to accept the situation and fall in love with the brothers the way Milly has fallen in love with Adam. The only thing is, they don't have anyone to perform the wedding, and there's no way the brides are going to consummate a non-marriage relationship. Never mind what the Production Code says. Adam is disgusted with this behavior and goes to a trapping cabin to spend the winter, even though Milly is now pregnant with his child.

Of course, there is that pesky Production Code, so we know that in the end everything is going to be made right. The fact that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is also supposed to be a light musical also requires the sort of happy ending that we're going to get once spring comes and the brides' families come for the brothers.

Fans of musicals will love Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, although most of those will probably already have seen the movie. I didn't dislike it, although I have to say that I'm still generally more of a fan of backstage musicals about putting on a show like 42nd Street or Gold Diggers of 1933 or biographical musicals since songs and dance numbers tend to make more sense there. It's easy to see why Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has such high critical praise.

How the West Was Won

I mentioned at the start of the week in conjunction with Debbie Reynolds being TCM's Star of the Month for March that there was was at least one of her movies that I've got on my DVR and haven't done a post on before. That movie is the epic How the West Was Won. It's coming up early tomorrow morning (March 30) at 4:30 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Spencer Tracy narrates this movie that at times feels like an anthology, but is really more of an episodic movie since some of the characters appear in multiple segments, and many of the characters who are only in one segment are all part of the same family. Anyhow, Tracy informs us that it hasn't been all that long since the American frontier was conquered, and that in the early days of trying to move west it was particularly difficult, at least until the construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) really made it a good deal easier to get to at least western Missouri. We then cut to 1839 for the first segment....

The first segment, called "The River" deals with one family trying to migrate west in search of more fertile land, although west here more or less means the Ohio Valley, which I'd have though was fairly comprehensively settled by 1839; Wikipedia suggests Cincinnati had already been incorprated for a generation and had a population in the mid-five-figure range. In any case, the family, the Prescotts, consists of father Zebulan (Karl Malden), mom Rebecca (Agnes Moorehead) and daughters Eve (Carroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds). They meet trapper Linus (James Stewart) before all of them get waylaid by some dubious pirates of the river (their leader is played by Walter Brennan). An accident in river rapids kills Mom and Dad; Eve marries Linus and Lilith heads for greener pastures.

Those pastures take her to Saint Louis in 1850, where she's workin as an enterainer who finds out that she's somehow inherited a gold mine out in California. So as with Westward the Women mentioned recently, she has to go west to California to take possession of the mine. She's followed by some suitors, notably professional gambler Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck).

Back to Eve's side of the story, when the Civil War comes she's got an adult son Zeb (George Peppard). Linus and Zeb both go off to fight, but when Zeb sees the hell that war truly is, a confederate he meets (Russ Tamblyn) suggests the two of them desert and go off somewhere together. But there's a lot more tragedy to come.

After the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad gets built. Zeb is still in the Army, now in the cavalry, trying to keep the peace with the various Indian tribes despite the fact that Mr. King (Richard Widmark), the man from the railroad, wants to get the track laid and who cares what the Indians think.

Finally, after leaving the Army, there's one last segment that reunites the two branches of the Prescott family. Lilith is forced to sell her home in San Francisco, deciding to retire to a ranch in the Arizona territory. But she's old, so she invites her nephew Zeb, by now married (Carolyn Jones playing his wife) to come along and run the place. When they get to Arizona, Zeb runs into Gant (Eli Wallach), an outlaw who's there to try to steal one of the shipments of gold.

It's easy on watching How the West Was Won to see why it was such a massive commercial success when it was released. The story is actually fairly pedestrian, but the movie was made in Cinerama, so I can only imagine how spectacular it must have been to see the movie as it was intended to be seen in the original Cinerama.

Unfortunately, however, most people don't have the sort of curved screen necessary to see Cinerama in its original aspect ratio and presentation format. In days past, this meant that TV presentations would be cut down, and there would be severe crease-like lines where the various segments of the print were supposed to meet up. Nowadays, restorers have tried to solve that problem through the use of the "smilebox" format that attempts to replicate the experience one would have had in the theater where the left and right edges of the screen are closer to the viewer than the middle.

I'm sorry to say that this doesn't quite work. First, I get the impression that the smilebox format is really more curved than it needs to be. Some of the photos I've seen of Cinerama screens do show a clearly evident curve, but not as much as the smilebox format has. The bigger problem, however, is how translating Cinerama to the smilebox distorts motion. I've always felt like there was something off in Cinemascope backgrounds when there are scenes with long panning in that the motion in parts of the background don't look quite right. In the smilebox format, this is much more severe, almost like what you'd see if you were moving around a sphere with stuff being reflected off of it.

But if you're the sort of person who doesn't tend to notice such distortion, or if you ever get the chance to see it in the original Cinerama (I don't know how many Cinerama screens still exist; would it be possible to translate Cinerama to an IMAX screen?), give How the West Was Won a chance. It's certainly a spectacle.