Key to the City Reviews

A pleasant comedy with some sharp lines and a bit of satire, this was Morgan's last film, as he died, at 59, shortly after the film's completion. At a mayors' convention in San Francisco, Young, the ladylike mayor of a tiny town in Maine, meets Gable, an ex-stevedore who now runs a northern California city. Although very different people, they are both serious and honest in their work. The convention gets a bit rowdy, and they are pushed into each other's arms through a series of funny complications. They involuntarily achieve notoriety in the local press and are close to going to jail (where Gleason is excellent as the booking sergeant) when, in a romantic scene on foggy Telegraph Hill, they realize that they love each other and wind up in a clinch. Early in the film each of them has been given a flower-laden key to the city, a huge souvenir. As the picture unfolds, the flowers fall off and they are left with ugly pieces of metal. They go back to Gable's small town, however, where they unite to defeat Burr, a crooked local politician with aspirations to becoming mayor. Many of MGM's stable of excellent character actors were used: Morgan is Gable's fire chief, a man with pyromaniacal tendencies, and Walburn is a noisy Texas mayor, not unlike Kenny Delmar's radio character, Senator Claghorn, on the Fred Allen show of the 1940s. Maxwell is "the other woman," a bubble dancer who would like to take Gable away until Young uses some judo to keep her man. Others were Blandick (who will forever be known as Auntie Em in THE WIZARD OF OZ), Sundberg, Freed, Foulger, Stone, and a very young Elam. Gable and Young deliver their comedy lines with the same conviction they always applied to their dramatic roles, so even the most feeble joke has a ring of believability. The script takes the usual convention story and punctures pomposity by making the revelers mayors instead of Moose or Elks or Lions. Some slapstick, some romance, a few bons mots, and excellent situations all add up to an amusing trifle.