San Francisco

MGM’s San Francisco is three films stacked on top of one another. The first is a Barbary Coast romance between a saloon keeper and a soprano. The second is an argument between the saloon keeper and his priest about whether a man can be decent without God. The third, which every cinemagoer in 1936 knew was coming, is the earthquake of 18 April 1906, and when it arrives after an hour and a half it knocks the other two flat. The first two are well made and faintly tiresome. The third is why the film is still watched.

Clark Gable’s Blackie Norton is both the engine and the problem. He runs the Paradise as a benign tyrant, keeps his hat on in church, and greets every mention of the Almighty with the expression of a man who has been offered a tract. Gable plays it with the grin and the impatience that made him, and for a while it is enough. Spencer Tracy’s Father Tim Mullin is the better performance and does not need to try. He takes Blackie’s punches in the mission gym, never raises his voice about anything holy, and plays goodness as a habit rather than a halo. The scenes between the two men are the best acted in the picture, partly because neither of them is singing.

Jeanette MacDonald sings a great deal: music-hall numbers at the Paradise, arias once Jack Holt’s Nob Hill impresario gets hold of her, and the title song more than once. Her voice is clean and enormous and slightly airless, and W. S. Van Dyke shoots her standing very still under a key light while the drinkers at the tables put their glasses down and listen. Herbert Stothart and Edward Ward’s music runs from saloon brass to a full opera pit to hymns, which tells you where the film is heading before the script does. Adrian dresses her in gowns that grow grander as she climbs the hill from the Coast to the opera house, and Oliver T. Marsh lights the Paradise bright and smoky, so that the crowds behind the principals never stop moving.

The trouble is the middle hour. Anita Loos’s screenplay, from Robert Hopkins’s story, is sharp about the Coast and about the toffs who come down to slum in it, and Jessie Ralph, as Burley’s mother, gets the best lines and knows what to do with them. But the film has decided Blackie must be brought to his knees, and it spends a long time arranging it. Every time the picture is enjoying itself somebody mentions God. We squirmed at the sermons, not because they are insincere, which they are not, but because they are aimed at Gable as though the studio were slightly embarrassed to have cast him.

Then the ground moves. Tom Held cuts the earthquake as a barrage: a pavement opens under a crowd, walls slide into the street, ceilings come down in clouds of plaster, miniature facades fold up and real people run among them so the join never shows. Marsh keeps the camera low, so that bricks fall towards the lens. Nothing stays on screen long enough to look like a model. We knew it was coming and it still made us jump, and then it kept going, past the point where a modern film would cut to a hero, into fires and dynamite and streets full of people who do not matter to the plot. It is the one stretch of the film that does not sort the deserving from the rest.

Van Dyke made The Thin Man in 1934, quick and light and over in an hour and a half. Here he is dutiful for ninety minutes and then, for twenty, very good indeed. That is the shape every disaster film since has copied: make us sit through the romance so the falling masonry has someone to land on. It runs 115 minutes, and you should not skip to the earthquake, because without the sermons it is only a very well-built pile of rubble.