Cimarron follows the plight of Sabra (Schell), a rich girl from the East who journeys to the untamed West beside her dashing husband, Yancey (Ford). The full scope of the pioneer experience receives its due, with everything from the pursuit of property to drilling for oil being depicted. Yancey's promising adventure will eventually turn sour but he'll get a chance to redeem himself in the final reel.

Mann wasn't the obvious choice to shoot an epic film in 1960, and the suits at MGM, rightfully or not, would eventually be sorry they hired him. Like many other directors at the time, Mann was shifting away from character-driven pictures to splashier projects that might convince viewers to abandon their dreaded TV sets for an entire evening. A lot of round pegs were being driven into square holes for the sake of generating a little more box office, and the pounding didn't always pay off.

Certainly, the Westerns Mann made before Cimarron rank with the greatest in the genre. Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Man from Laramie (1955), and The Tin Star (1957) are brilliantly constructed films that generate emotional impact with a bare minimum of melodramatic posturing. Although he moved his camera as gracefully as any director of the period, emotional angst rendered through extreme close-ups were Mann's forte, and he wasn't able to completely reconcile that visual orientation with Cimarron's vast landscapes.

Excerpt from TCM located HERE