Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)"San Francisco", MGM's 'Showcase' film of 1936, demonstrates why no other studio could 'touch' Metro at it's prime. Take the biggest star in Hollywood, team him with the 'Queen' of 1930s MGM musicals, add the greatest film actor of a generation in support, then top things off with a 'no-expense-spared' recreation of the most famous earthquake in American history, and an instant Classic was born!
Seventy years later, the film has lost little of it's luster; certainly the 'Message' is a bit heavy-handed, the long opera sequences may make some viewers cringe, and some of the effects (involving double exposures) seem quaint in an era of CGI...but Clark Gable still projects his signature cockiness and virility, Jeanette MacDonald is still radiant (and can sure belt out "San Francisco"), and Spencer Tracy is still magnificent (it is easy to see why he received a 'Best Actor' nomination, in what was obviously a supporting role; he easily steals the film, in every scene he's in).
Directed by the remarkable W.S. ('Woody') Van Dyke, a consummate craftsman, and one of MGM's fastest directors (contradictory terms, but he combined speed and style, effortlessly), with a screenplay, surprisingly, by future "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" author, Anita Loos (from a story by Robert Hopkins), "San Francisco" exudes confidence, from the riotously decadent New Year's Eve, 1905, opening scene, to the finale, as Gable, MacDonald, Tracy, and, apparently, most of the survivors of the earthquake and fire march to a hilltop, vowing to build a 'better' city, and singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", as they view the smoking ruins, which dissolves into the 'modern' San Francisco of 1936.
Corny? Certainly! But undeniably rousing, as well!
The 'Special Features' are excellent, as well; the TNT documentary, "Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Clark Gable", while glossing over some 'seamier' chapters of Gable's life, does offer insights by the daughter he secretly fathered by Loretta Young, and the son he died before ever seeing...and the biography is VASTLY superior to the one offered in the "Gone with the Wind" Special Edition. An 'alternate ending' is barely different from the actual one, other than offering more views of the city, but the 1936 MGM cartoon ("Bottles") is astonishingly well-crafted and gorgeous in Technicolor, and two Technicolor 'TravelTalk' short features, from 1940, on San Francisco, and Treasure Island, at the time of the 1939-40 World Exposition, are both very entertaining and a visual 'time machine' back to a simpler era.
This is a wonderful DVD, certainly worth owning!
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Romantic drama combines with humor, starpower combines with lavish spectacle and the walls come tumbling down! This Academy Award?-winning* extravanganza's street-splitting, brick-cascading, fire-raging recreation of the cataclysmic earthquake remains "one of the greatest action sequences in the history of the cinema, rivalling the chariot race in both Ben-Hurs" (Adrian Turner, Time Out Film Guide). Clark Gable plays rakish Barbary Coast kingpin Blackie Norton. Jeanette MacDonald portrays a singer torn by her love for Blackie and her need to succeed among the operagoing elite. Earning the first of nine career Best Actor Oscar? nominations,* Spencer Tracy is a priest who supplements spiritual advice with a mean right hook. He urges Blackie to change. But if love and religion can't reform Blackie, Mother Nature will.
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