Shaky ground

The Balboa Theater is screening a series of films made in San Francisco (or by local directors) over the next month or so. Tonight, with nothing else on my plate, I headed down to take in San Francisco, a 1936 effort from director W.S. Van Dyke set in 1906, the year of the earthquake and fire that ruined the city. (Today is the 99th anniversary.)

One James Dalessandro, author of the novel 1906, introduced the film, and casually "mentioned" that his novel and resulting screenplay will be converted into a blockbuster movie "sometime in the next six months."

The film itself is rather corny and extremely dated, and the story is actually fairly ordinary. Spencer Tracy is quite good, Clark Gable is appropriately dashing, and Jeanette MacDonald is just fine until she starts warbling, which is every six or seven minutes. (She also sings the same song about six times, at varying tempos.) The only things that really kept me interested were the local references, particularly those in which San Francisco is referred to as some sort of bacchanalian wasteland of sinners. (Rock on!) There's one great comical slap at Los Angeles too. But frankly, I'd expected more quake and less revue. It's pretty much a musical, and I'm not too into MacDonald's style.

But then comes the quake scene. Wow. If this one ever turns up on cable, I hereby advise you to skip the first hour and a half, but don't blink during the minute or so of violent tremors. It's badass. Whole walls of bricks bury people. The dome of City Hall falls down. The ground splits open. Balconies collapse with people on them. (There's even an aftershock, for good measure.) The subsequent fire and dynamiting of buildings are also spectacularly convincing, and the tent city scene is pretty realistic too. It's really a terrifying sequence.

I've only experienced a handful of quakes, all under 5.3 or so. One woke me up from a sound sleep. I missed one when I was rocking out in a noisy practice space. One time I thought someone had fallen down the stairs. I feel like I'm very aware of the risks of living here, and when I enter a room that I expect to spend some time in, I often think of what I would do in the event of a nasty quake. Lots of people -- even locals -- are quite ignorant of the potential for disaster here, either because they don't think they get worse than the 1989 quake (oh, yes, they do) or they believe that that one somehow defused the situation for another hundred years or so (no, it doesn't work like that). Yes, it could happen at any moment. But it's amazing what you can get used to.

I'll tell you one thing: those same moviegoers who were clapping along with Jeanette as she sang that song for the sixth time went silent a moment later when the disaster struck.