Watch The Oklahoman For Free

Wonderful Movie

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A brief recap of the plot-- After his wife dies in childbirth, Doc decides to remain with his young daughter in the little Oklahoma town and set up practice there. Trouble is that oil is on Indian land and only bad guy Dobie knows about it, so he tries various schemes to get Indian Charlie's land away from him. Meanwhile, Doc has struck up a friendship with Charlie whose daughter Maria takes care of Doc's youngster. So there's trouble brewing between the greedy Dobie and the Doc.Great role for McCrea as the doctor. His naturally likable demeanor is perfect for a caring physician. Of course, there's also that steely determination he can summon when needed and make us believe it. Dexter comes across as an intelligent bad guy, knowing when to strike and when to hold back, unlike most western bad guys who are too often stupidly aggressive. Barbara Hale as Anne makes a good mature counterpart to McCrea. Earlier they made The Lone Hand (1953) together, so the rapport is unforced. Then there's cult favorite Gloria Talbot as the Indian maiden Maria, Anne's rival for Doc's affections, though the Doc's too preoccupied to notice. On the whole, it's a non-scenic, rather easy-going horse opera, with some expected fisticuffs and a well-staged showdown. Nothing special, just another very watchable McCrea western, of which he made many during his productive middle years.

There is no earthly reason to watch this movie unless you are a huge fan or relative of one of the filmmakers/actors. It is completely inoffensive with nothing wrong and nothing right about it. It is very predictable. It has very little action. It is very boring. For example, none of the Indians were bad guys, and most of the townsfolk liked the Indians. Nice in real life, not so good for movies. I couldn't wait for it to be over.Three small note-worthy things: (1) Brad Dexter has a pretty big part as the heavy. He is the one actor amongst "The Magnificent Seven," who remained pretty unknown.; (2) I was very impressed with the gorgeous beauty and charisma of the actress who played McCrea's good neighbor on the wagon train, who continued on to California, leaving McCrea in Oklahoma. She isn't credited in the movie. I looked her up, Diane Brewster. Yummy! Too bad she didn't star as a female lead! and (3) if they were so offended by the smutty rumors about the Gloria Talbott character, they shouldn't have let her run around in that tight red dress.

It's the kind of movie that's most satisfying when it's late at night, everyone else has gone to bed, even the dog is dozing, and you find you've been on page twelve of "Buddenbrooks" for an hour. You need SOMETHING easy and reassuring -- and this is it.There's no question of who is good and who is bad. Joel McCrea is the doctor who wears a string tie and a vest and settles in a small town. (Guess whether he's "good" or "bad".) He's developing a nice relationship with the sympatico Barbara Hale, and he gets along with the local Indians. They know they've lost the battle for the frontier and are at ease with it. They've become farmers but remain proud and loyal. Doc McCrea hires one of them, the ingenuous but seductive Gloria Talbott as a housekeeper.Well, Gloria Talbott looks just great. She has big wet eyes and a thin mouth and an unwitting sensual presence. Okay, her make up is a little dark and she wears a necklace of bear claws so we don't forget, but so what? She falls in love with Doc McCrea and this complicates his relationship with Barbara Hale. The Doc, you will notice, has two sexy babes trying to get close to him. That's one of the advantages of being a doctor. All the women in town fall in love with you.But then we have Brad Dexter and his gang. They cuss the Indians out, make offensive remarks about McCrea and his live-in housekeeper. The townspeople, as represented by Ray Teal, are split in their attitudes. None of them likes Brad Dexter, just as no one liked Liberty Valence, but half the citizens are afraid to stand up to him.Dexter's brother assaults Talbott's father and is killed in self defense. The conflict becomes not just racial but personal. I don't want to give much more of the plot away. You can probably guess the outcome anyway.Hollywood is often criticized for its treatment of the American Indian, and I expect that on the whole, movies are an insult to their tribal societies. But the simple casting of Indians as fulsome savages was probably more common in earlier movies -- and cheaper ones. By the 1950s, the presentation of Indians was more sympathetic than otherwise. The dialog deals fairly explicitly with their position too, and should get some extra points for its honesty in doing so.But the movie itself is nothing special. It's just a better hypnotic than chloral hydrate or Nyquil.

As the title might suggest, "The Oklahoman" is set in Oklahoma, although that does not automatically follow; "The Virginian", after all, is not set in Virginia. The action takes place during the 1870s, at a time when Oklahoma was still known as the Indian Territory and was officially reserved for Native Americans, although in fact it also had a sizeable white population.John Brighton is a doctor whose wife dies in childbirth while they are on a westward-bound wagon train. Dr Brighton abandons his plans to move to California and decides to settle in the small town of Cherokee Wells. The main action takes place several years later. Brighton has established his practice in the town, but becomes embroiled in a land dispute between greedy rancher Cass Dobie and a small Indian farmer; Dobie has discovered that there is oil on the Indian's land and wants to force the rightful owner off. Another strand to the plot involves Brighton's love life. Although Joel McCrea was in his fifties when the film was made, Hollywood has never had any problems with older man/younger woman love stories, and such stories were particularly prevalent in the 1950s. Brighton therefore finds that two beautiful young women, one white and one Indian, have fallen madly in love with him.No prizes for guessing which of the girls eventually wins out. The film's politics on racial issues are, by the standards of the fifties, mildly liberal, but that liberalism does not extend to matters of the heart. The film's attitude towards Native Americans, in fact, is that they deserve to be treated as equals by the white man, provided that they assimilate into white culture and adopt the white man's ways. Dr Brighton's friend as a young man fought for his tribe against the whites, but after being defeated has given up his traditional lifestyle and taken up farming. Most Indians in Westerns have names like "Running Bear" or "Red Eagle", but this one has the distinctly Anglo-Saxon moniker of Charlie Smith.This film appears to have been made as a B-movie and is not, by any means, well-known today; I note that mine is only the third review it has received on this board. Before I recently caught it on television I had never heard of it or of its director Francis D. Lyon, and its star McCrea was best known to me for his role in Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent", even though in the latter part of his career he specialised almost exclusively in Westerns.Yet this is a film which I feel deserves to be better known. There is a good performance from McCrea in the leading role as a peaceful, mild-mannered man whose sense of honour demands that he should make a stand against injustice. (A frequent Western theme. Brad Dexter is also good as the villain Dobie, adept at using a mask of sweet reasonableness to hide the fact that he is by nature an unpleasant bully, and Barbara Hale and Gloria Talbott make a lovely pair of young heroines. The film has a strong storyline, and moves along at a brisk pace, leading to the inevitable climax. "The Oklahoman" may not be in the same league as the great Westerns of the fifties (films like "High Noon", "Shane" or "The Big Country"), but it is a good example of a very decent second division Western. 7/10