Another Western, you say? But why this one? Even the director, Budd Boetticher, admitted it wasn’t very good. Audie Murphy wasn’t right for the part of the Cimarron Kid. “He’s sensitive, he’s got taste, and guts.” Presumably those qualities weren’t wanted for Bill Doolin, the character Murphy plays. Doolin comes across as a reluctant outlaw, a crack shot who takes no pleasure in using his weapon and seems pained to be leading a life of crime.
I’ve got a rule of my own that might do you good to remember: there will be no killing unless it’s forced upon us.
Other members of his gang have cool, tough guy nicknames like Bitter Creek and Dynamite Dick. Granted, Murphy’s short stature (he was 5’5”) made him well-suited for “kid” roles—he played Billy in The Kid From Texas a year earlier—but here he’s too well-dressed to be plausible as the defacto leader of a gang of ruthless bank robbers. Really, he just wants to hang out with his girl.
Murphy had an image to keep up. Three years earlier, he’d published a best-selling memoir about his wartime experiences, To Hell and Back (1949). A World War II hero, and a Texas boy who really could ride a horse and shoot, he was surprisingly humble in his book. People liked that about him: Audie got the job done.
Of course, there was more to it. Murphy didn’t become the most decorated combat soldier in US military history without tremendous suffering. He was involved in some of the worst battles of the European theater, including Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and Southern France, where he saw his closest friends die. Half-crazed, he single-handedly wiped out an entire German squad in the Ardennes; wounded, he also managed to commandeer a burning tank, using its .50 caliber machine gun to drive the enemy away.
He would be plagued by nightmares for the rest of his life and was, as Boetticher recognized, “a complicated young man.” But audiences saw only the earnest kid. At the end of this picture, he agrees to go to jail. 
His girl promises she’ll be waiting for him when he gets out. Not your typical Western ending, but it fit with the image of the damaged, war weary young veteran.
Gregory McNames quotes his New York Times obituary. “When Murphy was asked how soldiers such as he managed to overcome the horrors he had seen, he replied, ‘I don’t think they ever do.’ ” That message doesn’t come across in The Cimarron Kid as strongly as in Shane, but you can’t help feeling sorry for Murphy in this picture.
Deathless Prose 
This post was really interesting, Lisa. I saw some of those Murphy movies when I was very young, and I remember my dad, who was also in WWII, talking about how Audie Murphy was a big war hero. I didn’t know any of these details, however. Thanks!
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You’re welcome, Susan. Maybe it’s been done, but a cultural history could be written of the Western’s appeal among WWII veterans. My father loved them too.
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Lisa….really like your opening in this one….
“Another Western, you say? But why this one?”
Then, however, I see no answer to your question.
Aarrgghhh!!!
Why this one indeed, especially since there
are so many other westerns deserving of your
attention?
What gives?
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Charlie, I will confess that my chief interest in this film is Murphy himself. He figures in the third Cara Walden mystery (set in Saigon in 1957, during the filming of The Quiet American). I wanted to know how he was perceived by people at the time, was drawn into his personal story. They didn’t call it PTSD back then, but he’s a textbook case, and yet I don’t want to leave him there, as a diagnosis. He was (as Boetticher said) complicated.
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Your mention of Murphy’s stature reminds me of Bob Steele. He starred in a number of B westerns. Despite his lack of height, he never hesitated to take on in a fight taller tough guys who outweighed him. Talk about feisty! I liked that about him. Murphy, for whatever reason(s), never appealed to me. So, I never saw any of his movies. Why should moviegoers even care about his character in THE CIMARRON KID?
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In real life, Murphy definitely did not lack for courage. Yet, in terms of Hollywood clout and starring roles offered to him, why did he seemingly suffer in comparison with, for example, John Wayne?
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He didn’t have the chops, obviously. To Hell and Back, the movie of his memoir (in which he played himself) was a big hit, though. Imagine the trauma, Murphy having to relive the events that had so deeply scarred him. Poor guy couldn’t say no.
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Your comment about reliving a trauma prompts me to recall Neil Simon’s CHAPTER TWO. Briefly, that play and then later the movie version featured Marsha Mason, then Simon’s wife in real life. Since the storyline was effectively a re-telling of Simon’s courtship of her and their subsequent marriage, imagine Mason’s dilemma in playing the part. Like Murphy having to relive events that had “so deeply scarred him,” Mason found herself in a similar position. Yet, somehow, she came up with the wherewithal to pull it off. My hat went off to her for such a memorable accomplishment. Psychologically, it had to have been a daunting challenge.
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THE CIMARRON KID came out in 1952, long before the era of spaghetti westerns. In that earlier heyday of westerns, audiences were manipulated to cheer for the good guys and boo the bad guys. Westerns could be viewed strictly in terms of black (bad) and white (good) then. Yet it appears here that you’re saying the audience should be pulling for a bad guy, an outlaw. What am I missing here?
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Sometimes we can’t help pulling for the bad guy. Maybe it’s the outlaw instinct in all of us? Apparently there was a town in Oklahoma that harbored the Dalton Gang when things got hot, and the gang repaid the favor by sharing some of their ill-gotten gains. And there are recorded instances in ancien régime France where mobs at public executions sided with the criminals, who seemed to be acting out the grievances of the ordinary subject.
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Not long ago I watched (again) BROKEN TRAIL (with Robert Duvall and Charles Hayden Church) on a cable movie channel. Afterwards I read the novel (of the same title) that serves as the basis for the movie. Suffice it to say, the story offers perceptive insights into how inconvenient and uncomfortable life could be in the old west. I thought about that as I read your comment about how well-dressed Murphy’s Cimarron Kid is. These days as I watch reruns of RAWHIDE on TV, I notice how on those long cattle drives, the drovers seemingly have no change of clothing and must work AND sleep in the same clothes for months on end. Whew! I guess the Cimarron Kid doesn’t have to worry about being “too ripe” (especially in the company of his girlfriend) or being able to find clean and fashionable clothing, as he pulls off his heists. Lucky him!
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John Wayne stayed pretty clean in The Searchers. I think Sergio Leone was the first to show his characters sweaty, dusty, and unshaven. They were also natty dressers, however. Viva Italia!
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Do westerns have a shelf life?
Once upon a time, Roy Rogers (atop Trigger) and Gene Autry (astride Champion) enjoyed widespread popularity. But now, who even remembers them or their onscreen exploits?
The Lone Ranger, accompanied by Tonto, was definitely a white hat guy, always acting to foster law and order in the old west. And, of course, his theme song was readily identifiable by millions as the music for his TV show, as opposed to by its actual status as the classical composition THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE.
But have westerns become passe?
If you were to do a man-in-the-street series of interviews, would even one person in ten be able to name an Audie Murphy western?
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Westerns as a genre seem to be of perpetual interest, don’t you think? The genre is reinvented to make it relevant, but the products (and spin-offs) are of varying quality. Not many of Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Westerns are remembered today, but Django and Franco Nero were big hits at the time, and Corbucci went on to work with big stars like Jack Palance, Eli Wallach, and Burt Reynolds.
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Two thoughts on Westerns, in response to Wolf Brandt’s question whether they’ve become passe. One is that in American culture, Westerns, formerly a dominant form, have simply been dropped in favor of superhero stories. This is an idea I read somewhere, and I’m not sure what I think of it. It may be true as an observation, but if so what does it mean? A second thought is that the Western, whatever exactly we mean by the term, has simply climbed into a rocket and gone up, up and away—in other words, that it’s present as an underlying influence on many space stories, and sometimes as an overt model. The opening narration of the original Star Trek TV series invoked the Western by way of the American frontier when Captain Kirk intoned, “Space—the final frontier.” An October essay in The New Inquiry on the original Blade Runner film and its recent follow-up declared at the end of its first paragraph, “Blade Runner, you see, is a western.” The author admits it’s a latent pattern in the first film, but he makes his case pretty well.
The Cimarron Kid sounds to me like a film—perhaps the auteur theorists have a name for it—in which the auteur theory itself fails to play out, because the perspective imposed on the story by one of its cast members clashes with the perspective called for by the script and/or the director. But, given Lisa’s summary, I wonder whether the point of the story was not the redemption of the hero/villain by love. That development seems more suited to a Romantic drama than to a Western, but maybe that’s really what this film is, or part of what it is.
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Yes, space Westerns should count (I note you are not following Yahoo style either . . .) Good guys and bad guys need not ride horses, but the tropes are the same. We seem to be hard-wired to enjoy those stories.
Budd Boetticher was barely in charge of this picture–it was an early one for him and he did his best with what he was given.
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Boetticher hit his stride when he started making westerns with Randolph Scott.
Speaking to the point of westerns being dead, I think it’s a little early for a funeral. We’ve recently seen the remake of “The Magnificent Seven” and “True Grit”. Both of Eastwood’s kids have recently starred in (bad) westerns, Leo starred in “The Revenant” and “Hostiles” is due to be released in January. And let’s not forget the very excellent westerns being made outside of North America, like Australia’s “The Proposition”, Denmark’s “The Salvation”, or Austria’s “The Dark Valley”. The western is far from dead, but we might see the message change in years to come.
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There are also some excellent television dramas. Did you watch Deadwood? I’ve also heard good things about Godless.
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I’ve watched the series several times. So smitten was I that I have travelled to the town of Deadwood twice to check the place out in person. My only criticism is the excess of profanity; people just did not talk like that in those days.
“Lonesome Dove” was the best of the TV westerns, better than many movies, in my opinion. I’ve never heard of “Godless”…I have to check that one out!
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