Preceded by: Willie and Eugene Howard in "Between the Acts at the Opera." (1926, 10 mins, B&W, 35mm) With The Jazz Singer, Old San Francisco is an important example of the kind of ethnic and racial stereotyping that was found in the films of the twenties. Set just before the 1906 earthquake, the film pits Hispanics against Chinese in telling of an aristocratic Spanish family whose property is threatened by the ever villainous Warner Oland. He plays a Tenderloin-district czar turned real estate developer who is heartless in his persecution of the Chinese. When he reveals his own Chinese origins, he is considered a traitor to his own people and despised by the whites among whom he has passed. The climactic quake destroys not only the city above, but a secret subterranean Chinatown as well. The soundtrack introduces characters with musical motifs-Dolores Costello by a Spanish theme, Oland by a vaguely Oriental one. Despite its distasteful elements, the film, as Kevin Brownlow points out in The Parade's Gone By, provides genuine aesthetic pleasure in its skillful treatment of the melodrama, a tribute to the talents and visual sense of director Alan Crosland (who also directed The Jazz Singer and Don Juan), and the stunning cinematography by Hal Mohr.