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). Gable plays rakish Barbary Coast kingpin Blackie Norton. MacDonald portrays a singer torn by her love for Blackie and her need to succeed among the operagoing elite. 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.