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June Movie of the Month: Dance Fools Dance (1931)
This month, Joan Crawford is a plucky newspaper reporter and Clark Gable is a loathsome gangster in Dance Fools Dance. Crawford is Bonnie Jordan, a rich girl suddenly thrown into the real world after her father dies and she finds out all his money is gone. She goes to work as a writer for the local newspaper. One of her assignments is to go undercover and get a story on a gangster, Jake (Gable). As Jake pursues her romantically, Bonnie finds out that her unscrupulous brother Rodney (William Bakewell) has hooked up with Jake’s gang and is in deep trouble. Joan and Clark were steaming things up behind the scenes…
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Gossip Friday: A Lurid Play By Play
From January 1941: I’ll bet Clark Gable could have walloped that youngster who hung around the “Comrade X” company on location and shinnied up a telephone pole, gathered a crowd below him, and did a play-by-play broadcast of Clark’s hurry-up change of clothes in his outside dressing room. The company was on location at Los Angeles harbor and Clark was dressing in a ceilingless enclosure. The youngster did a thorough job by shouting to his hilarious audience, “He’s takin’ off his left shoe—now he’s takin’ off his right—now he’s putting on his shirt!” he didn’t miss a trick, he even got in a lurid description of Gable’s colored shorts.
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Gone with the Wednesday: 75 Years of Frankly My Dear…
Seventy-five years ago this week, on June 27, 1939, Clark Gable uttered what was to be the sentence that followed him around the rest of his life and beyond–“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” June 27 was the the last day of principal filming on Gone with the Wind, and even though the film was not shot in sequence at all, it happened to be the day they filmed the very last scene. Here’s some trivia regarding that famous last scene and that enduring line: The original line in the book is “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” Producer David O. Selznick threw in the “Frankly” for…
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Gone with the Wednesday: Some Upcoming 75th Anniversary Events
Following the celebration in Marietta, there are a few more events in the coming months celebrating Gone with the Wind’s 75th Anniversary: The 75th Anniversary edition Blu Ray will be available Sept. 30. The transfer is the same as the 70th and so is most of the content, aside from a documentary “Old South/New South” which compares Civil War locations then and now. For a while i heard rumblings of both a new Gable documentary and a new Leslie Howard one on the set, but alas it does not appear to be. It does include a music box and a replica of Rhett Butler’s “RB” handkerchief (yes, I’m serious.) More…
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Gossip Friday: A Fan’s Poem
A fan’s poem from 1933: Judgement Day There’s the rush and roar of many feet– Young maids, old maids, sour and sweet. They’re clamoring, they’re yammering, They are glad that they are born, For romance is resurrected When Clark Gable blows his horn. ~Dvoll Semay
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Gone with the Wednesday: Marietta Celebrates the 75th Anniversary
This past weekend, I was among the “Windies,” taking part in the Marietta Gone with the Wind Museum‘s 75th Anniversary Celebration in Marietta, Georgia. Three days of activities were planned and Gone with the Wind fans came out in droves…I met people from all over the country, from Italy, England and Russia. (Shout out to Kendra, Robbie and Marissa, who made the event so enjoyable for us!) On Friday, we attended a satire play of Gone with the Wind called “The Wind Has Left,” with Patrick Curtis (toddler Beau in GWTW) as Rhett and Morgan Brittany (Vivien Leigh in “The Scarlett O’Hara Wars” and “Gable and Lombard”) as Scarlett. It…
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Gossip Friday: Building Clark Gable
From February 1936: At a party we saw Mrs. Clark Gable chatting with the ex-wife of a famous star. “My husband didn’t play fair about alimony,” said the ex-wife. “I gave him the most dignified divorce Hollywood ever saw. I chaperoned him and his girl friend for months to avoid scandal. Now she has him when he’s on top. I worked for him during the building years.” Mrs. Gable nodded quietly. “I know a little about building myself.”
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Gone with the Wednesday: Memorable Scenes Await You!
From Screenland magazine in December 1939, a preview of some of the scenes that were awaiting audiences!
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Gossip Friday: Saving Clark’s Soul
From October 1935: Poor Clark Gable had to stand a lot of ribbing about being prayed for by members of a church in his old hometown, and everybody wanted to know how he was “serving the devil of lust.” Clark himself has some curiousity on the subject, too. Jack Oakie, who worked with Clark on “Call of the Wild,” was, at last reports, endeavoring to convert Clark by preaching to him, but without much success. Jack took on the duty because he took on such a long beard for the picture that he looked like a biblical patriarch. Anyway, it may all suggest a new religious film to some producer.
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May Movie of the Month: Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931)
It took me two months to do the Nutshell Reviews for all 66 of Clark’s credited roles. Now that that is over, it’s back to Movie of the Month! This month, Clark Gable is paired with the Grande Dame of the screen in this scandalous pre-production code romance, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. Garbo is Susan (born Helga), an illegitimate orphan raised in shame by her aunt and her cruel husband, who treats her like a slave. He picks a man for her to marry “so you won’t be without a wedding ring like your mother”. When the man tries to rape her, she runs away in a rainstorm,…