Sister to Blossom Rock, Brother to the Bay
San Francisco (1936)
directed by W. S. Van Dyke
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
In a way, Clark Gable's acceptance of God at the precise moment when He smites 3,000 residents of California is not the sort of holy turnaround that movie execs thought the yokels back east wanted, but instead Clark's character's great cynical gesture. "You killed all these people in order to save Jeanette MacDonald and serve her up singing at this funeral like an angel on high. Just for me!"
Maybe. It's the only way I can stomach the second half of the movie. But why not believe the holy rogue himself, who supposedly hated the final scene so much that he insisted on being filmed from behind to save the audience from watching him repeat such "soppy" lines?
Clark, as Blackie Norton, is the king of the Barbary Coast, and when he sits with his crown, drinking champagne and boxing at the local gym, San Francisco could last and last. But it doesn't, because Blackie falls in love with the daughter of a Colorado preacher, and Norton's own preachy preacher friend - and no actor could play Clark Gable's foil better than Spencer Tracy, the drip - wants him to allow her to sing. But not in a saloon, toasting the New Year and kicking her garters, but in the opera.
Of course there's another rich nobody who wants Jeanette for his own, and she's so struck with her own possibility that she floats from man to man, not knowing - until God talks to her, as well - that her heart was Blackie's all along. But kids, don't see it for the singing. See it for Clark, a true professional, and see it for the glee in uncredited director W. S. Van Dyke's unending destruction of San Francisco. For carnage and disaster, no alien invasion comes close.
directed by W. S. Van Dyke
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
In a way, Clark Gable's acceptance of God at the precise moment when He smites 3,000 residents of California is not the sort of holy turnaround that movie execs thought the yokels back east wanted, but instead Clark's character's great cynical gesture. "You killed all these people in order to save Jeanette MacDonald and serve her up singing at this funeral like an angel on high. Just for me!"
Maybe. It's the only way I can stomach the second half of the movie. But why not believe the holy rogue himself, who supposedly hated the final scene so much that he insisted on being filmed from behind to save the audience from watching him repeat such "soppy" lines?
Clark, as Blackie Norton, is the king of the Barbary Coast, and when he sits with his crown, drinking champagne and boxing at the local gym, San Francisco could last and last. But it doesn't, because Blackie falls in love with the daughter of a Colorado preacher, and Norton's own preachy preacher friend - and no actor could play Clark Gable's foil better than Spencer Tracy, the drip - wants him to allow her to sing. But not in a saloon, toasting the New Year and kicking her garters, but in the opera.
Of course there's another rich nobody who wants Jeanette for his own, and she's so struck with her own possibility that she floats from man to man, not knowing - until God talks to her, as well - that her heart was Blackie's all along. But kids, don't see it for the singing. See it for Clark, a true professional, and see it for the glee in uncredited director W. S. Van Dyke's unending destruction of San Francisco. For carnage and disaster, no alien invasion comes close.
posted by NPK at 6:31 PM
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