“You shouldn’t get me confused with those kind you read about in the storybooks. You know, with a heart of gold? If I had a heart of gold, I would have sold it long ago for twice what it was worth.”

At some point, any kid raised in a family that watches college sports will eventually ask their parents about some of the less self-explanatory mascots. What’s a Hoya? A Tar Heel? A Boilermaker? What, pray tell, is a Sooner? My mother, who homeschooled us for many years and then taught for another couple decades at a small private school, used these types of situations as opportunities for sneaky history lessons. Sooners, it turns out—and this is a little nugget of American history I’ve carried with me since I was like six years old—refers to settlers who jumped the gun on the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, who tried to claim their massive plot of free land before the allotted time. (TANSTAAFL.)

The opening segment of Anthony Mann’s Cimarron, the second adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel, builds up to this moment of utter chaos when countless potential landowners are unleashed to stake their claims. Culminating with thousands of extras, horses, and carriages, all stampeding across the countryside in pandemonium, this invigorating sequence spoils the viewer, who will surely find the subsequent melodrama involving Glenn Ford’s lawyer/cowboy, his wife (Maria Schell), and a generous handful of role players (Anne Baxter, Arthur O’Connell, Harry Morgan, David Opatoshu, Russ Tamblyn, Mercedes McCambridge, Robert Keith, Aline McMahon), to be quite underwhelming by comparison.

A newspaper is cultivated into a prosperous business, oil is struck, babies are born, public office is sought, wars are fought, consciences are awakened over the theft of Native American land, families are abandoned. But when set against the excitement of Ford musing on the upcoming event by drawing lines in a coating of flour on a kitchen table, and then seeing that event realized so brilliantly on the screen (bolstered by some nifty special effects), this slow simmer is disappointing, with most of its shortcomings attributable to a feeble screenplay that never coalesces, narratively clunky editing, and a micromanaging studio that relegated most of the film’s potentially epic shoot to backdropped stages.