It's the 100th anniversary of The Great San Francisco Earthquake - and the 70th anniversary of the film about it.
If an event on the same scale - Richter, to be precise - as the great San Francisco quake of 1906 happened today, a movie on the subject would go into development literally overnight. But, largely due to the fact that cinematic technology was in its infancy back then, thirty years elapsed between quake and movie - by media age standards, a gap wider than the fault the city sits on.
In the wake of the quake's anniversary, 1936's San Francisco is a film worth revisiting.
It was MGM's stock in trade to pull out all the stops, and San Francisco was no exception. In fact, 1936's San Francisco may be the very film that embodies that used-to-exhaustion studio era slogan, "the movie that has it all": it's a romance-musical comedy-disaster-religious epic!
Clark Gable is Blackie Norton, a brash smoothie who runs The Paradise, a San Francisco nightclub. He runs for office against a crooked syndicate, while trading tonsorial thunderbolt Jeanette MacDonald back and forth with them.
Was there ever any actor better suited to black and white than Gable? That wet, dark hair, glossier than a newly printed 8x10; that silent film star mustache; that wide, white smile. MacDonald sings 'til she drowns out cable cars, and a cardboard San Fran shimmies like one of Blackie's chorus girls, but you can't keep your eyes off Gable. His plaintive American puffery is truly irrepressible, even when, after the climactic event, he's searching through the rubble for the presumably lost MacDonald in a dusty tuxedo.
It hardly hinders his cause that the real star of the show, the quake - an amalgam of stock footage, rear projection, mattes, maquettes, backlot ingenuity, Eisensteinian cuts and wall-of-sound foley - appears a lot less impressive today; more evidence of the depth of the mistake being committed by modern film producers, staking everything they've got on that diminishing return, the special effects movie.
Does Blackie find his songbird? Of course, and in the process, his soul, much to the delight of Father Tim - who else? Spencer Tracy - who has been trying to reform him since they were kids.
Would a comparable film today have a plot line as corny? Another "Of course", if the recent remake of King Kong is anything to go by.
So, instead of putting yourself through anything as interminable as that - and we do know, as the earthquake anniversary broadcasts never tired of informing us, that another "big one" is nigh - do yourself a favor: venture to the oldies section of your video store, and check out San Francisco
