"San Francisco” Realises Screen's Greatness

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 291, 9 December 1936, Page 11

"San Francisco” Realises Screen's Greatness

ACCLAIMED STARS IN VAST HITMAN SPECTACLE (Regent: Screening To-morrow), combining tremendous Human appeal with gorgeous spectacle, this story of “San Francisco’’ in the gaudy days before the earthquake, sweeps up among the recordbreakers. Its entertainment value is superb. Romance, drama, and music are present in the persons of Clark Cable, Jeanette MacDonald, Jack Holt, and Spencer Tracy. This quartet, backed by the powerful humour-slashed direction of W. S. Van Dyke, turns in its most brilliant work. . All the world becomes strangely still. The very air is oppressive. Animals cower from some invisible Pear. Only Man, absorbed in the tasks which civilisation has laid upon him, is unaware.

And then the floor slides away beneath his feet. Ceilings fall. Walls crack and crumble. In a devil’s pandemonium the world goes crazy. Ancient Earth has become tired of supporting its gigantic burden of ocean. Its broad shoulders have sagged ever so slightly. And a thousand miles away that shrug becomes a shudder, and thousands die as a great city is shattered. That is how an earthquake strikes. But the picture is no crazy parade of destruction; Jeanette MacDonald’s arias are an unforgettable delight. The audience is swept along by a screen play which is so cleverly contrived that almost always it is convincing. It allows Miss MacDonald to sing a galaxy of songs, ranging from music-hall ditties to hymns, from ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to tho Jewel Song from “Faust;” and never do you feel that a song lias been injected iuto the play just for the sake of allowing tho MacDonald to sing. Gable’s study of the dive owner, in love with the beautiful songstress without quite realising it, is thrown into stronger relief by a magnificent piece of character acting by Spencer Tracy. He is Father Mulliu, the parish priest, who joyfully knocks down in the gymnasium his boyhood pal, Blackie but who can’t in the least impress upon him the tremendous gulf that lies between things spirituous and things spiritual. The story progresses until there comes the night of the Chickens Ball, great annual event of tho combined music halls of tho Coast. At this stage of the story all the romantic wires are crossed. It’s difficult to guess what’s going to happen next.

Then, the first shock of the earthquake strikes. Now follow scenes which are awesome in their stark realism; horror is piled on horror in ~—s as vivid as the screen has yet given us, as a city topples in a mighty upheaval, then to bo swept by flame. And so magnificentlty is this picture directed that it is in the scenes which follow the holocaust, scenes which depict the regugees clustered together in the open park lands, that the story reaches its peak in dramatic intensity, with the sense of courage and of hope powerfully conveyed.