Really, this feature is so close in content to the earlier 1936 disaster movie / musical melodrama smash hit "San Francisco" it could have been called "Oakland". Like "S.F." it concludes with a famous tragic disaster which decimates the city, featuring an extended spectacular special effects sequence and precedes that with a hokey story involving two feuding men, both rivals over ownership of the seedy but profitable entertainment part of town as well as a female nightclub singer, although thankfully this time not of the highbrow operatic style of Jeanette MacDonald, but in the more entertaining low-brow style of Alice Faye.
At least the film acknowledges the source of the fire as being caused by Mrs O'Leary's cow but then seeks to build its narrative around the whole family, starting with the sentimental sacrifice of Pa O'Leary just as he's leading his young family to a new life in the old town, the rise of Ma O'Leary's laundry business there and the rise to prominence by different means of her two ambitious sons, one, played by Tyrone Power, who is the shady risk-taker, the other, played by Don Ameche, the straight arrow lawyer and later mayor of the town. There is actually a non-entity third brother too who we briefly see ensconced with his Swedish wife (she complete with bangs in her hair and overdone accent just in case you didn't know) but the main story concerns the rivalry between the two older siblings, Power's ruthless ambition contrasted with Ameche's principled altruism, their relationship strained further when they separately cross swords with established gangster and nightclub owner Gil Warren played with Victorian panto-villain exaggeration by Brian Dunlevy.
To be fair, all this is very much grist to the mill, once the fateful cow kicks over the lantern in old Ma's barn setting off a conflagration which soon enflames the whole timber-built poor section of the city the men are feuding about and the SFX used are very effective indeed. Naturally the great fire creates tragedy for the central family but at least it serves to straighten up bad boy Tyrone as his old mum gets to her feet at the end to proclaim that the city will rise again, never mind that it was her negligence which saw it rased to the ground in the first place.
The backstory here is very hackneyed indeed despite the best efforts of an enthusiastic Power, Ameche and Faye, however, how Alice Brady got an Oscar for her terrible acting as the family matriarch is beyond my ken. Director Henry King certainly does a fine job of recreating the spectacle of the fire but before that his work is slapdash and slipshod.
A huge hit on original release it was probably a relief to cinema-goers that there were no other natural or man-made city-destroying disasters in recent American history for Hollywood to dramatise as this one, in the wake of the superior "San Francisco", certainly took the sub-genre down a notch or two in quality.
At least the film acknowledges the source of the fire as being caused by Mrs O'Leary's cow but then seeks to build its narrative around the whole family, starting with the sentimental sacrifice of Pa O'Leary just as he's leading his young family to a new life in the old town, the rise of Ma O'Leary's laundry business there and the rise to prominence by different means of her two ambitious sons, one, played by Tyrone Power, who is the shady risk-taker, the other, played by Don Ameche, the straight arrow lawyer and later mayor of the town. There is actually a non-entity third brother too who we briefly see ensconced with his Swedish wife (she complete with bangs in her hair and overdone accent just in case you didn't know) but the main story concerns the rivalry between the two older siblings, Power's ruthless ambition contrasted with Ameche's principled altruism, their relationship strained further when they separately cross swords with established gangster and nightclub owner Gil Warren played with Victorian panto-villain exaggeration by Brian Dunlevy.
To be fair, all this is very much grist to the mill, once the fateful cow kicks over the lantern in old Ma's barn setting off a conflagration which soon enflames the whole timber-built poor section of the city the men are feuding about and the SFX used are very effective indeed. Naturally the great fire creates tragedy for the central family but at least it serves to straighten up bad boy Tyrone as his old mum gets to her feet at the end to proclaim that the city will rise again, never mind that it was her negligence which saw it rased to the ground in the first place.
The backstory here is very hackneyed indeed despite the best efforts of an enthusiastic Power, Ameche and Faye, however, how Alice Brady got an Oscar for her terrible acting as the family matriarch is beyond my ken. Director Henry King certainly does a fine job of recreating the spectacle of the fire but before that his work is slapdash and slipshod.
A huge hit on original release it was probably a relief to cinema-goers that there were no other natural or man-made city-destroying disasters in recent American history for Hollywood to dramatise as this one, in the wake of the superior "San Francisco", certainly took the sub-genre down a notch or two in quality.