The First Western To Win the Best Picture Oscar Has Problems
The Big Picture At the 4th Academy Awards in 1931, Cimarron became the first movie of the Western genre to take home the prize for Outstanding Production, the award now better known as Best Picture.
What ‘Cimarron’ Gets Wrong About the Female Experience In terms of representation, Cimarron contains glaring flaws in its portraiture of the movie's female characters, upholding the unfavorable stereotypes of women too commonly explored in the early traditions of the Western genre.
Estelle Taylor plays the role of Dixie Lee, one of Cimarron's most thinly-written and enigmatic female characters. Dixie Lee first encounters Yancey at the film's start when she slyly beats him to claim a plot of land in the Oklahoma Territory that he had been eyeing. With dark hair and eyes, always clad in black gowns, Dixie Lee is treated by the film as a take on the femme fatale, but for reasons never made clear in the movie's screenplay.
Isaiah, portrayed by Eugene Jackson, is a young Black domestic worker for the Cravat family who sneaks in to join them on their journey to a new life in Osage. Depicted as a pure yet simple-minded figure, Isaiah's character is a victim of racist stereotypes forced upon Black actors during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Included mainly in the narrative to provide comedic impact, Isaiah is problematically treated as the punch line to many jokes.
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