SAN FRANCISCO (1936) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: W.S. Van Dyke II
Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald,
Spencer Tracy, Jack Holt
Gable plays a saloonkeeper, the fast-talking owner of the hottest joint on the Barbary Coast. MacDonald plays a songbird from Colorado, who can knock out an aria or a music-hall tune with equal facility. Tracy plays the neighborhood priest, Gable's boyhood pal from the streets. So Jeanette walks into Gable's place looking for work and he hires her, but she'd really rather sing opera. But Gable gets her under contract and won't let her go, and besides, he's kind of taken a fancy to her, but she resists, and Tracy keeps turning up to offer spiritual guidance and to keep her from showing her legs on the stage of Gable's saloon, and then there's this earthquake. Nobody knew how to make art serve commerce like the guys who ran MGM in the '30s, and this is a crowd-pleasing example of that, topped off with the kind of sanctimonious overkill that only MGM in the '30s could get away with. The earthquake effects look real good for 1936.
