1933: Is The Future Threatening Gable?

Is the Future Threatening Gable?

By Jay Brian Chapman

Motion Picture magazine, October 1933

Clark steered safely past one big risk—the risk that his sudden, sensational success would change him. But now his roles are threatening to turn him from a “he-man” into a “gentleman.” Can he hold his popularity, if they do?

“To tell you the truth,” said Clark Gable, “it does get me a buttle punch-drunk.”

By “it” Clark meant film success and the social life of Hollywood’s elect, into which he had been thrust so suddenly and unexpectedly.

Then he hastened to assure us that he wasn’t really in danger, that he knew the perils lurking for such a man as himself in a lavender-scented existence. He pointed out that he had known hunger, and that the lessons of the lean, hard years had toughened the fiber of him until he was proof even against this!

“Besides, I’m not a kid, you know,” he added. “Life has had plenty of chance to make me whatever I am. It can’t change me so easily from now on.”

The real kick about these remarks, as they apply to a grave danger that confronts Clark today, lies in the fact that he uttered them two years ago!

Even then, he realized that he had a tough fight on his hands against that never-tiring, wily and subtle opponent—soft living. It threatened to strip him of the vital energy required to project his sort of personality from the screen. It threatened to make him soft in body, brain and courage.

Today, we know that he won the first stage of the struggle, but it took something out of him, as such a fight will—made him a little less invincible against another phase of the cunning, persistent old opponent’s attacks.

Also, his mode of life has departed somewhat from the one of Spartan rigor that characterized the early days of his fame. He now attends parties, fussy dress affairs “out,” and evening social functions. The look of martyrdom that used to shine so brightly on his face, when they did drag him into a party in those days, is no longer apparent.

Clark Faces a New Menace

And now Fate has suddenly reached out a hand to help Clark’s antagonist, and to pile up the odds against the most popular actor on the screen today. Let’s impact this new danger he faces. It all begins with the return of a certain screen trend, which came about in this manner:

Everything in Hollywood goes by “trends,” except when a “trend” or cycle is shattered rudely by the public’s interference with the cinema course of things. That happened when Clark Gable came into view. He was trying to break in at the wrong time—just when his “type,” personified by Bancroft, Bickford, and Bill Boyd, having had profitable innings, was beginning to bow out in favor a “polished gentleman” sort of film hero. Yet Clark crashed through, thanks to a mighty, vibrating, full throated roar of encouragement from the public’s rooting section.

“Hold that line, hold that line!” piped the dismayed “gentlemen” actors and their supporters. But it wasn’t any use. Clark was over for a touchdown, and behind him, hardly able to believe that a miracle had happened and the tide had turned so suddenly back in their favor again, clumped his hard-bitten teammates. Of the old-timers, only Bill Boyd and Vic McLaglen recovered quickly enough from their surprise to follow, but newer “tough eggs,” such as James Cagney and Lee and Spencer Tracy, were right on the job,

It was a hard-boiled, he-man, woman-socking era that followed, and no mistake! That is, until a certain slightly-built, studious-appearing young fellow, who wears glasses off the screen, came into the cast of one of Clark’s pictures, “A Free Soul.”

His Most Dangerous Rival

Leslie Howard, himself, never learned exactly the truth of the situation. When he had finished his strong, sympathetic part in the picture, a part in the picture, a part greatly enhanced in appeal by the very skill and force of Gable’s “villain” portrayal, he shook the dust from his heels, and disgustedly entrained for New York. Films were jolly well off on one of their “type” stampedes, he thought, so they held no lure for him.

Then some lady columnist or other created a saying about Gable and women. It was copied and repeated widely, in many versions. Ladies, she declared coyly, love brutes best, after all; no red-blooded American woman could resist the big, rough, unscrupulous, but handsome man such as Clark portrayed. All the vaunted feminine love of finesse, gentleness, and such “finer qualities,” she opined, was just so much baloney!

Some thousands of American women took her seriously and launched an indignant protest! And, because Leslie Howard had played hero to Clark’s villain, countless women said by inference that they could go for Leslie in a bigger way than for Clark! Back rolled the tide in favor of “gentleman types.” Howard, amazed, and not sure he was pleased, was dragged back to Hollywood.

But don’t rush to the conclusion that this is the danger now confronting Clark—that he may be swept out with the ebbing of the “he-man” tide. Producers speedily discovered that Clark’s followers were still as many and as loyal as ever, and perceived that such an actor and personality could hold his place in any screen era.

Might Be a Two-in-One Hero

Clark’s danger today does not lie in the fact that there are too many popular “gentleman type” actors on the screen, but in fact that there are too few of them!

With an eye on Gable’s tremendous following of “fans,” and a knowledge of his versatility, producers are wondering if it wouldn’t pay to have him play “gentleman type” roles. His “fans” might remain loyal, and perhaps, in a sympathetic, polished needs to keep his characters, he’d attract a host of new ones!

That would be a fine way of killing two birds with one stone, but if the plan is a failure, it might easily ruin Clark professionally, by losing both groups of his followers.

That, however, looks like a minor danger beside the one that will arise if producers, in giving Clark “gentleman type” roles, seek to soften his screen character. That will destroy the vital quality that makes him different, that attracts us to him. He is a good, versatile actor, who can portray a real gentleman as easily and effectively as a lovable roughneck. But the screen’s “gentleman type” is something else again. It is too soft and poetical to fit on Clark’s husky shoulders.

And if, with or without his cooperation, an attempt is made to “gentle” the man, himself, it might let that ever alert, always-waiting antagonist we have been talking about sneak in a deadly wallop. A physical “kayo” that would spell the professional count of ten as well, since Gable, more than any other high-ranking screen idol of our day, needs to keep his health, vital force and condition.

Not as Physically Fit Today

Clark, of late, hasn’t been so well. Forced out of one film cast by appendicitis, he is taking it easy, recuperating from his operation. The immediate cause of his illness, I believe, was a strenuous cougar-hunt –and nothing can be more strenuous!–undertaken when he was seriously out of condition, from a continuous succession of pictures.

Study a photograph of Clark taken two years ago, then glance at one of his latest. You can se plainly the working out of a “polishing” process. The Dempsey-like appearance of his earlier portraits is erased. Some of the recent ones go so far as to give him a poetical, “spiritual” look.

So far, this change is entirely superficial. The make-up men and the photograph re-touchers have done it, by filling in an etching away Clark’s hard-bitten character lines In real life his face may have softened a trifle, but hardly noticeably.

Oddly enough, Clark is the only “hard-boiled” screen idol menaced by this peculiar state if cinema affairs, a dearth of really good “gentleman type” actors and a wealth of able, popular “roughnecks.” No one thinks of trying to make a Phillips Holmes of George Bancroft, a Buddy Rogers of James Cagney, a Franchot Tone of either of the Tracy boys, or an Adolphe Menjou of Edward G. Robinson.

What He Might Become

But Clark presents a big temptation. Soften and erase that Dempsey-like ruggedness of countenance, sophisticate his hard. But naïve youthfulness by a little moustache such as he now wears, and you might have someone a bit like Cary Grant or George Brent, with—perhaps!—the appeal of a Gable.

Then he might be given roles such as Phillips Holmes played so effectively in “The Man I Killed.” Fancy, if you can, a man of Gable’s type as we know it, spending part of his life in a psychological phobia of remorse because he had killed an enemy in a hand-to-hand combat of the late War!

Even if such a change in him “got by” with Clark’s followers, it might react badly upon the man himself. And that would be too bad after the fine scrap Clark has put up against the wily old antagonist of his, who uses so many different subtly-dangerous weapons. The weapon of flattery, for instance.

How they’ve talked about Clark’s powers with women! Some lady scribe or other said Clark finally had to go to Buster Keaton for advice on avoiding the fair sex, and Buster prescribed marlin-fishing and deer-hunting. The fact that she was a lady scribe made it worse, for Clark might deduce that one of her sex should be able to gauge his appeal accurately by her own reactions.

Then there’s another type of flattery given few other film idols as lavishly. Not content to note that Clark is a husky, well-set-up fellow of about Jack Dempsey’s height and weight, with a bit of Jack’s facial appearance, prose poetesses have written odes on Clark’s physical prowess. They brought out all the old Dempsey-descriptive adjectives, and struck not a few comparisons, such as: “he hits like Dempsey” and “he moves with the grace and quickness of a tiger.”

Still Able to Kid Himself

Fortunately, Clark spent some time in lumber camps. There a man is quickly forced to form a realistic conception of his own powers. He isn’t allowed to retain the illusions of your average shoe salesman, for instance, who may go through life believing himself to be at least as good as Max Schmeling.

So when he was having a boxing lesson recently, Clark stopped poking at his professional trainer’s elusive jaw for a moment to chuckle: “Gable—he hits like Dempsey!”

That sort of feet-on-earth, humorous cynicism s a fine armor for him, and has doubtless helped him to avoid many such calamities as that which befell Heywood Broun’s fictional baseball character when a sob-sister styled him “a Greek God!” The Broun hero, you may recall, lost his job as baseball’s greatest outfielder because, just as he was about to make a throw , he’d remember that “Greek god” business and pose Greek-god-like for that fraction of a second which makes the difference between a big-leaguer and a dub!

So far, Clark has shed flattery as a duck sheds raindrops, and he has tried pretty hard to stay tough and alert and capable. Despite the more dangerous trials now before him, I see him heading across for another touchdown—if we in the rooting section keep bellowing encouragement, loud and long!