KEY TO THE CITY clicked open in 1950, a sober year dominated by the start of the Korean War, the opening of the McCarthy witch hunts, President Truman’s go ahead to develop the H-bomb, and Diners Club delivering the first credit card: hard to say which was the worst decision. On the less urgent movie front, critics (and those who pretend they are), after dutifully paying homage to All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard, make note of the year’s slew of noir melodramas and slate of superior westerns. But there were some laughs available—Cheaper By The Dozen, Born Yesterday, Father Of The Bride, Harvey—among them this forgotten rom-com spoofing small-town politicians and conventions. Written by Robert Reilly Crutcher, directed by MGM comedy pro George Sidney, it reunites Clark Gable and Loretta Young fifteen years after 1935’s Call Of The Wild and backs them with a raft of vetted supporting players. Done for a trim $1,500,000, a neat $6,600,000 in revenues claimed 28th place for the year.

San Francisco hosts a convention for mayors from across the 48 states (Alaska & Hawaii still in limbo); among the reps are rugged ‘Puget City’ longshoreman-gone-crusader ‘Steve Fisk’ (Gable, 49) and refined-to-righteous ‘Clarissa Standish’ (Young, 37), of ‘Wenonah’, Maine. We know from the get-go that Steve & Clarissa will bicker before bonding; it’s just a matter of how silly the shenanigans can get and how  serviceably they can be sold by script and stars.

Gable had long had it down to craft-as-science, and Young was gliding on a career renaissance spurred by The Farmer’s Daughter, The Bishop’s Wife, Rachel And The Stranger and Come To The Stable. Frank Morgan puts energy into what was his last role; 59, he was felled by a heart attack after the shoot wrapped. Gable, who’d done five films with him, was a pallbearer at his funeral. A subplot to the rocky-but-rest-assured romance has Fisk fighting corruption, culminating in Clark and bad guy Raymond Burr having a knockdown/ drag out fight that includes going after each other (and their doubles) with stevedore hooks. Before this mano a mano clash, director Sidney (and/or 2nd unit director George Rhein) stage a great comic brawl in a Chinatown nightclub. Among the winners in the supporting lineup are Raymond Walburn, as ‘Mayor Billy Butler, the Mayor of Longhorn, Texas, the Pride of the Panhandle’; Pamela Britton as ‘Miss Unconscious’ and Marilyn Maxwell as ‘Sheila the Atom Dancer’.

Pros all, hustling to & fro: Lewis Stone, James Gleason, Clinton Sundberg, Marion Martin, Victor Sen Yung, Clara Blandick, Bert Freed, Peter Brocco, Byron Foulger, Joi Lansing (‘Miss Garbage Truck’), Emory Parnell, Edward Gargan, James Flavin, Marvin Kaplan, Frank Ferguson, William Phipps, Jack Elam. 101 minutes.