Review of San Francisco (1936) by Robert B — 25 Jan 2012

San Francisco (W. S. Van Dyke, 1936).

I have been trying for months, since I first saw San Francisco, to find some way to scrub the final scene out of my head so I can give the rest of the movie a good review. And I just can't do it. (And I do mean months; I just looked it up on the spreadsheet, and I watched the movie on September 4, 2011. I am writing this review on January 20, 2012.) Which is a shame, because the rest of Woody van Dyke's film, coming from a screenplay by the great Anita Loos, is really quite good. It has a lot to say, and it says it well. And then... there is that ending, that hideous, hideous ending, and I will warn you now that there is no way I will be able to write an entire review without mentioning it. Therefore, cover your SPOILERS ears and let's get going.

Plot: Mary Blake (Jeannette McDonald) is an aspiring opera singer who makes her way to San Francisco in the early part of the century. When she gets there, she's cold and penniless, and is taken in by nightclub owner Blackie Norton (Clark Gable), who quickly recognizes Mary's talent and gives her a job. When the owner of San Francisco's biggest opera house hears her in Blacke's establishment, he offers her work there, but Blackie doesn't want to let her go.

But the main plot isn't what this movie is about, really (nor is it about the climactic Big Earthquake, though that footage really is impressive-and while no one has ever mentioned it, I swear some of that montage footage was lifted from Frisco Jenny, which had come out a couple of years previous). It's actually about Blackie and his childhood friend Mullin (Spencer Tracy), now a priest, and their constant bantering about Blackie's avowed atheism. If anything, Mary is a poker chip, an indicator of Blackie's feelings towards religion, which he does his best to separate from his lifelong friendship with Mullin; this is one of the movie's most impressive aspects, really. It's all great fun, and it's one of the few times Gable and Tracy were paired in a film; that lone makes it worth the price of admission.

But then comes the earthquake, and Blackie's sudden one-eighty that has to have been mandated by a studio head somewhere along the way (or added to placate the Hays Commission, which amounts to the same thing if you were a schlub paying your nickel in 1936). To have spent an hour and forty-five minutes creating this wonderful, believeable character, throw subplots at him that show us exactly how he'll react in various situations, give him all the love and then all the heartache in the world... and then have him embrace what amounts to a deathbed conversion? It's fantastically stupid, as blissfully moronic as the studio-mandated theatrical ending to Victor Sjostrom's incredible The Wind, and one wonders that there was not rioting in the streets. It undercuts everything that Loos, in her otherwise-marvellous script, had built. It's a bloody awful ending to a bloody good movie, and it poisons the entire thing. However, that said, you can safely turn the movie off at the end of the Big Earthquake without missing anything you're not expecting to see (save that idiotic scene); you will have a much better time with this movie if you do. ***.