Monday Minute
No. 62 | March 29, 2010

“City” Flickers

Movies are always about people.  Sometimes they tell you who it’s about right in the title—e.g., Precious, Annie Hall, Forrest Gump.  Sometimes the title is the name of a place—Key Largo, Chinatown, Moon.  In that case, you don’t expect a travelogue but a movie about people who lived there or went there at a certain time.  Usually that’s how it works, though there are exceptions.

This week’s films are movies named for a familiar type of place, a city.  Sometimes the connection between the city and the story is historical, sometimes metaphorical, sometimes something else.  At times that connection is  clear, and at times—when we get to the Coen brothers—not.

MAD About Movies is still suffering jet lag from its recent world tour (see our visits to England and Japan), so this time let’s stick to cities on the U.S. map (sorry, Casablanca fans, some other time).  There is one other distinction that the five movies for this week share.  More about that on Friday; meanwhile you’re welcome to guess what it is.

Our theme this week
Films named for U.S. cities

San Francisco (1936)

The city
Founded:  1776
Named For:  St. Francis of Assisi
Nickname:  The City by the Bay; Baghdad by the Bay (don’t call it “Frisco”)
Population:  809,000

 

The earthquake of 1906

Today

 
The movie
Release Date:  1936
Director:  W.S. Van Dyke
Cast:  Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy
Oscar Summary:  6 nominations, 1 win

 

San Francisco is the earliest and probably the least known of this week’s films.  Stars Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy appeared in many other films we’re more likely to remember.  Jeanette MacDonald is better known for her films with singing partner Nelson Eddy.  (She went on to have an opera career as a soprano; he was a baritone in opera before his film work.)  But San Francisco was a big hit in its day.  It was the top-grossing movie of the year, making millions of dollars for MGM. 

San Francisco is an early disaster flick, set in 1906, that eventful year when the city was devastated by an earthquake.  As Jack London put it:  “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed.  San Francisco is gone.”  The disaster scenes are not as amped-up as in later Hollywood spectaculars, but they are very well done; there’s a reality to the collapsing buildings and frightened crowds that we typically don’t see with movies of today that rely heavily on CGI and other special effects.

Gable stars as Blackie Norton, a roguish Barbary Coast saloonkeeper, who hires, falls for, and fears losing, singer Mary Blake, played by MacDonald.  One highlight is MacDonald’s version of the title song “San Francisco,” which (among other renditions) wins top prize at the Chicken’s Ball, right before the shaking starts.  The song was a hit, popularized later by Judy Garland, and today is an anthem of sorts for San Franciscans.

San Francisco, open your golden gate
You let no stranger wait outside your door.
San Francisco, here is your wanderin’ one
Saying “I’ll wander no more.”

There’s more Hollywood hokum than history in the final scenes, an uplifting ending that appealed to audiences three decades after the real-life disaster.  It makes me wonder how the movies will handle the disasters of the past decade—9/11 and Katrina—after another generation goes by.  It’s hard to imagine they’ll get the same treatment.

---

San Francisco 
The Earthquake

---

San Francisco 
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

This ending, fading to a long shot of the rebuilt city, was used for the 1948 re-release.  The original 1936 ending had shots of street life and construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.  MGM thought the ’30s version looked dated, so they changed it.

---

Quote of Note
“There are eight million stories in the Naked City.  This has been one of them.”
—Narrator (Mark Hellinger, producer), The Naked City (1948)

…58…59…60.