Romantic drama combines with humor, starpower combines with lavish spectacle and the walls come tumbling down! 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). Clark Gable plays rakish Barbary Coast kingpin Blackie Norton. Jeanette MacDonald portrays a singer torn by her love for Blackie and her need to succeed among the operagoing elite.