The Peaches Christ of the Old Barbary Coast

San Francisco is one of those cities that challenges one's travel fu in the deepest way. If you're going to go there, I say, then why not make the absolute best of it?

Of course that could apply to any destination, but when it's San Francisco, the benefits of beforehand research can pay off in a very big way in terms of pure fun. It's a shame not to do so.

In the weeks leading up to our departure, I had spent nearly every free minute at home taking pages of voluminous notes and making sketch maps of possible activities for us. I didn't want to waste a single hour of our time there.

Red had been there only twice before, when she worked for the Big Consumer Products Conglomerate, so she was open to just about any suggestion as to a theme this time. I had already settled on making a tour of historic hotel bars, something that has become my specialty. She liked this idea a lot.

It also turns out that she didn't know much about the 1906 Earthquake and the fire that ravaged the city afterward. A couple days before we left, we rented the 1936 MGM feature San Francisco, one of my favorite movies from that era.

It turns out the television I bought last month in Beaverton has Amazon Prime installed right in the firmware, so after configuring the Internet connection, we were able to download and watch the movie at our leisure (so we won't have to put the t.v. away until the next Olympics after all).

Although San Francisco, directed by "One-take" Woody Van Dyke, has been largely forgotten today, TCM considers it one of the landmark movies in the history of American cinema, as judged by the ten minute featurette they produced, and which they still show from time to time.

If you've seen the movie, you know why it was groundbreaking (amazing special effects, with the directorial help of D.W. Griffith).

It was the top-grossing movie of the year it came out. Moreover it introduces the famous title song that contains the lyrics "open your Golden Gate," which is sung repeatedly by Jeanette MacDonald.

Yet I would hesitate to recommend it to my friends, many of whom are devout atheists, because of the strong religious theme at the end. But it's hard to blame someone for falling to their knees in prayer when they see their entire city destroyed in one day (see map). It seems San Francisco has always been a place that has provoked ideological and spiritual extremes.

Red liked it a lot (she had never seen a Clark Gable movie before), and I enjoyed it as much the second time. In fact, the image of MacDonald as the "Colorado Nightingale" on stage in the Barbary Coast doing her bluesy earthquake summoning dance was still playing my head while we watched the drag queens dancing on stage at the Castro Theatre. It felt like a direct link between the past and the present of this magnificent place.

What more could one want, to dive head first in this city, so unique among the metropolises of the world?

The version of the song I mentioned starts at 1:26 in this clip, and takes place just around 5 A.M. on April 18, 1906. Amazing to think the movie was made only thirty years after the earthquake, in living memory of the event. What would San Francisco look like now if it had been similarly destroyed in 1984?