“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.

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.

…58…59…60.

Oscar Déjà Vu

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Film titles with two Oscar nominations for Best Picture

Featured this week
Monday         —   Moulin Rouge (1952, 2001)
Tuesday         —   Cleopatra (1934, 1963)
Wednesday    —   Heaven Can Wait (1943, 1978)
Thursday        —   Romeo and Juliet (1936, 1968)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, 1962)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Director:  Frank Lloyd
Writers:  Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson; based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall
Cast:  Charles Laughton (William Bligh), Clark Gable (Fletcher Christian), Franchot Tone (Roger Byam), Movita (Tehani), Mamo Clark (Maimiti)
Oscar Summary:  8 nominations, including Picture, Director, Actor (Laughton, Gable, Tone), Adapted Screenplay; 1 win (Picture)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
Director:  Lewis Milestone (replacing Carol Reed, uncredited)
Writer:  Charles Lederer; based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall
Cast:  Marlon Brando (Fletcher Christian), Trevor Howard (William Bligh), Richard Harris (John Mills), Tarita (Maimiti)
Oscar Summary:  7 nominations, including Picture; no wins

The essentials
The math says 1962 is much closer to 1935 (27 years) than to 2010 (48 years), but the look of the later production feels closer to something from our era of moviemaking than it does to the earlier film.  In part that’s a result of the widescreen color photography, the spare-no-expense budget, and the three-hour length.  But the performances also make a difference, with a cast led by Marlon Brando offering a more naturalistic, less hammy, rendering of the story.  That’s not to say the newer version is a better film; I rather enjoyed 1935 film.  (These days, we’re not likely to see another Mutiny on the Bounty made.  Now, they’d change the ship to a spaceship and those nature-loving Tahitians to the Na’vi; they wouldn’t film it in Panavision, but 3-D, and they’d shorten the title too.  Avatar fans may want to note, for the record, the ship sent a year later to search for the missing Bounty was the HMS Pandora.) 

The 1962 film took more liberties with the truth, though both films were based on the 1932 book Mutiny on the Bounty, which itself is a historical novel, not a history, of the real-life mutiny that took place in 1789.  William Bligh was the commanding officer of the Bounty during its fateful voyage of the South Pacific.  After a stop in Tahiti, a group led by Fletcher Christian took command in a bloodless mutiny, sending Bligh out to sea in a small boat with a few of his loyalists.  Bligh lived to return to England.  The mutineers settled in Tahiti and Pitcairn Island, where some of their descendents live today.  The mutiny, and the cruelty of Bligh toward his crew that led to it, is the stuff of legend.  The tale’s been told in poetry and prose (among the storytellers:  Lord Byron, Mark Twain, and Jules Verne), and at least half a dozen films. 

Beyond the final credits
Of the ten Best Picture nominees featured this week, the 1935 release of Mutiny of the Bounty was the only one to win the prize.  The film was the first ever to have three acting nominations, and the only one to have three nominations for Best Actor—Laughton, a great actor here chewing the scenery, Gable, minus his mustache, and Tone, as the true hero of the story.

…58…59…60.