Mayors Go Wild

While making the 1935 movie Call of the Wild, Clark Gable had an affair with his co-star, Loretta Young, that resulted in her getting knocked up, going off in private for several months to have the child, and "adopting" the child. Fifteen years later, the two stars would be reunited for the movie Key to the City.

Young plays Clarissa Standish, the mayor of Wenonah, ME, one of those medium-sized towns that populated Hollywood movies and which there seem to be too many of compared to the US population as a whole. She's in San Francicso with a whole bunch of other mayors from similarly made-up medium-sized towns for a convention. (The US Conference of Mayors claims to represent 1400 mayors of cities with populations of at least 30,000; I don't know how many cities of that size there were back in 1950 when Key to the City was released.). Mayor Standish is there presumably to look into the latest in fire trucks of something. But a lot of the mayors seem to be there more to schmooze and party.

One of the mayors in the latter category is Steve Fisk (that's Clark Gable if you couldn't tell), mayor of Puget City, CA. He was a longshoreman and worked his way up to mayor. Having gotten into politics this way, he's not as secure in his position as somebody like Clarissa who is the niece of a federal judge (Lewis Stone). As for Steve, he's there with his fire chief(? -- why would the fire chief be there?) Duggan (Frank Morgan in his final movie; this one was released after he died).

Steve and Clarissa meet and it's love at first sight, although there are going to be complications along the way. A bunch of the mayors go to a nightclub where the star attraction is the dancer Sheila (Marilyn Maxwell). Steve unintentionally starts a riot that results in a bunch of people getting hauled into the police department, where Sgt. Hogan (James Gleason) tries to keep the mayors' predicament from becoming public.

Of course, things do go public for both Fisk and Standish. It's a bigger problem for Fisk, since he's got strong political opposition back in Puget City, where Taggart (Raymond Burr) is trying to get some sort of housing development nixed in the short term so that he can get his contractors the contract to build it, or something like that. By this time, Clarissa has agreed to marry Steve, so she follows him to Puget City where he tries to salvage his political career.

Key to the City is one of those many post-World War II movies made at MGM which seem to have gone wrong somehow. I don't know if it's just that they didn't change with the times quickly enough or whether they were more concerned with the Freed Unit musicals, but increasingly when I watch MGM's A movies from this period they all seem to have something not quite right about them. In this case, Key to the City really feels like a movie that would/should have been made before the war. A decade later, however, and everything feels perfunctory and sterile. The movie also feels like it's got some sort of bad plot hole that made what's supposed to be a farce ending tediously unfunny for me.

Still, Key to the City is filled with competent performances by aging character actors who try their best in the supporting roles, only to be brought down by a subpar script. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so you can judge for yourself.