San Francisco

Earning the first of nine career Best Actor Oscar? nominations,* Spencer Tracy is a priest who supplements spiritual advice with a mean right hook. Romantic drama combines with humor, starpower combines with lavish spectacle and the walls come tumbling down! This Academy Award?-winning* extravanganza's street-splitting, brick-cascading, fire-raging recreation of the cataclysmic earthquake remains "one of the greatest action sequences in the history of the cinema, rivalling the chariot race in both Ben-Hurs" (Adrian Turner, Time Out Film Guide). Jeanette MacDonald portrays a singer torn by her love for Blackie and her need to succeed among the operagoing elite. Clark Gable plays rakish Barbary Coast kingpin Blackie Norton. He urges Blackie to change. But if love and religion can't reform Blackie, Mother Nature will.

When the quake hits, and the fire follows, the movie uncorks some really quite awesome special effects, including the unforgettable image of a street heaving up and separating under people's feet--much superior to the disaster effects in The Last Days of Pompeii, made just a year earlier. "San Francisco, open your Golden Gate...." If the classic city anthem isn't part of your life already, it will be after a viewing of this 1936 hit, a wonderful blend of cornpone, spectacle, and song. As they would subsequently demonstrate in Test Pilot and Boom Town, Gable and Tracy have great he-man rapport together (Blackie's rampant maleness is challenged only by the fact that he knows the priest could punch him out). Like the disaster movies that followed (including In Old Chicago, a Fox cash-in from a couple of years later), San Francisco slowly establishes its characters before unleashing the destruction. Needless to say, this could only be MGM in its heyday, laying on the big budget, an acceptable level of naughtiness, and a dose of religious turnaround in the end. --Robert Horton Director W.S. Van Dyke (The Thin Man) keeps everything cracking along, except for those moments when Cultcha rears its head and MacDonald sings an aria. Clark Gable is Blackie Norton, a cocky and ruthless Barbary Coast character whose heart is--well, not softened, but at least dented by the arrival of an opera singer (Jeanette MacDonald) looking for a job. It's set in 1906, the year the earthquake flattened much of Baghdad by the Bay. He hires her for his rowdy club, while his childhood chum, Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy), disapproves. It worked then; it still does.