Flame of Barbary Coast Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Flame of Barbary Coast Blu-ray Movie Review

Where's Sensurround when you really need it?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 21, 2013

In 1936 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer puts its legendary production expertise (not to mention copious piles of cash) into San Francisco, a romantic melodrama starring Clark Gable as a gambler and Jeanette McDonald as a singer at a teeming club on the Barbary Coast in the first decade of the twentieth century. The film trundled along with various romantic entanglements as well as efforts of a kindly priest (Spencer Tracy) to help Gable pry himself away from the gambling tables, until the climactic sequence, a recreation of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake, featuring then state of the art special effects. The film was a huge (actually gargantuan) hit that year, raking in more money than any other feature, and ultimately garnering several Academy Award nominations, including what was then the Best Picture award, called Outstanding Production (it won one for Sound Recording). Republic Pictures, usually the studio which got to the parade grounds just as the revelers were packing up and going home, brought out Flame of Barbary Coast (some wags may cynically deride the studio for being too cheap to include a needed “the” before the location in the title) in 1945 and for those audience members who remembered San Francisco from 1936, it may have seemed like “déjà vu all over again”, at least by and large. John Wayne plays Duke (hmmm. . . .) Fergus, a Montana cowboy who shows up in San Francisco to collect a debt owed to him, but who is soon seduced by the lure of easy riches at the gambling emporiums. He develops a rocky romantic relationship with the wonderfully named Flaxen Tarry (Ann Dvorak), a singer at a teeming club on the Barbary Coast. There’s no kindly priest, to be sure, but there is a “climax” of sorts featuring a typically small scale Republic recreation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

John Wayne didn’t always get the requisite “star introductions” in many of his films, at times just kind of showing up without much build up. In Flame of Barbary Coast he’s actually introduced with his back to the audience. Flaxen is in the back seat of a horse drawn coach bouncing along a nascent coastal lane when her driver notices a “cowboy” down on the beach, throwing rocks into the roiling surf. Flaxen is obviously instantly smitten. The cowboy turns and smiles sheepishly, asking her, “It’s big, ain’t it?” Subtext, anyone? As if that weren’t euphemistic enough, Flaxen is soon joined by another coach being driven by a rather curt gentleman who seems to know her. When this man asks who the cowboy is, Flaxen indicates he’s a visitor, while the cowboy launches into an appreciation of the curt guy’s mare, with descriptions that are obviously aimed directly at Flaxen herself. These comments include the classic line, “Good head”. Were forties’ audiences aware of these none too subtle references?

Flaxen takes off but the curt man offers to give the cowboy a ride into town, dropping him off at the cowboy’s destination, a casino where the cowboy aims to collect a debt owed to him by the club’s owner. Guess who that turns out to be? The curt man is in fact Tito Morell (Joseph Schildkraut), whom we see auditioning a comely young aspirant (Virginia Grey), even having his current leading lady (and paramour) Flaxen into his offices to meet her potential competition. When Tito’s floor manager informs him there’s a guy out in the main hall claiming he’s owed money, Tito rather surprisingly doesn’t react with ruthlessness, but instead orders drinks to be served to the guy and then goes out to “introduce” himself, even though he’s just dropped the cowboy, whom we now know as Duke, just a few minutes prior. And so the three main character cogs in this wheel are firmly in place.

Flame of Barbary Coast presents at least a few unexpected changes to the typical Wayne persona in these Republic films. Duke (the character) is fleeced by Morell, even as Flaxen tries to use Tito’s rigged floor games to help her new interest, and that turns Duke into a man with a mission, namely becoming a gambling ace. He’s helped in this regard by a professional gambler named Wolf Wylie (William Frawley, just a few years before he immortalized himself as Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy). It’s at least a little unusual for Wayne to be playing a character who has this questionable desire for wealth based on betting or games of chance. But Flame of Barbary Coast ups the ante (no pun intended) by having Duke lust after Flaxen, when it’s rather clear she’s more or less committed to Tito, for better or worse. Is Duke the cowboy version of a home wrecker?

Perhaps the film’s most unusual element is the character of Tito himself. Flame of Barbary Coast is rather unexpectedly nuanced in its treatment of this ostensible “villain”. Tito is suave, mannered and not especially vicious when you get right down to it. He’s a man who has a noble lineage (as is hinted at several times), and he carries himself with a certain aristocratic authority. And while he’s a chauvinist and maybe even a bit of a misogynist (as evidenced by the way he pits the Dvorak and Grey characters against each other), he isn’t necessarily malevolent. Even Duke himself in the film’s post-earthquake showdown gives Tito a little brotherly clip to the jaw and commends Tito for being a nice guy—some of the time. While this unusual decision might seem to rob some of the “good guy vs. bad guy” energy from Flame of Barbary Coast, it actually works surprisingly well, and it gives Schildkraut one of his best screen opportunities.

As for the earthquake itself: well, let’s just say Republic’s Herbert J. Yates was no Louis B. Mayer. There are some factual issues at play here, notably in that the film seems to suggest the earthquake hit at night when from what I've been able to glean online it actually occurrred early in the morning. That said, cameras shake to indicate the rumbly tumbly world of the tremblor, while a few miniatures collapse and then lots of stock footage of fires is shown. There’s even a 1945 precursor to Sensurround at play with an omnipresent lowish (emphasis on the ish) frequency drone. Audiences of the day may have been momentarily wowed, but for modern day eyes and ears, the effort is fairly laughable. The film has an okay song score (Dvorak is not exactly a world class singer), but if you’re wanting an all singing, all dancing earthquake-centric spectacular, your better bet is probably San Francisco.

Flame of Barbary Coast Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Flame of Barbary Coast is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. This is very much in line with the glut of Republic catalog releases we've been seeing lately from Olive. There are the requisite number of scratches, white flecks and specks, but overall the image is rather decently crisp, with good contrast and actually pretty commendable sharpness, at least most of the time. There are some stock shots which are noticeably grainier than the bulk of the film (as should be expected). Typical of an Olive release, this doesn't appear to have undergone any digital tweaking in its preparation for high definition.

Flame of Barbary Coast Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Flame of Barbary Coast's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track is, like the image quality, very much in line with other Republic catalog releases we've seen from Olive lately (as well as in fact the recent Universal-International release of One Touch of Venus). There's some minor but noticeable distortion in the opening credits underscore, but once that anomaly is gotten past, things are largely pretty nice sounding. The film has quite a bit of music (the score was Academy Award nominated), all of which sounds quite full bodied, at least given the recording technologies of the day. Dialogue is cleanly presented and there's no real damage to report. The climactic earthquake includes some decent sounding foley effects, including that quasi-low frequency rumbling mentioned above. It's nothing even approaching what modern day audiences would demand, but for its era, it's relatively effective sound design.

Flame of Barbary Coast Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

Flame of Barbary Coast Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Duke the actor playing Duke the character might seem like a pretty tired exercise, but this Duke (the character) is at least a little unusual for Duke (the actor). The film is obviously a lo-fi knockoff of San Francisco, but it has its own small scale pleasures, including a really nicely done supporting performance by Joseph Schildkraut, probably one of his best screen outings between his Oscar winning The Life of Emile Zola and what should have been his Oscar nominated performance in The Diary of Anne Frank. It's also fun to see William Frawley in a pre-Fred Mertz role (Paul Fix and Butterfly McQueen are also on hand). This Blu-ray features very good video and audio and comes Recommended.