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Movie of the Week: Boom Town (1940)
This week’s movie is Boom Town (1940). Gable is “Big John” McMasters and Tracy is “Square John” Sand, or as Big John calls him right from the beginning, “Shorty”. They are two wildcatters out west trying to strike oil. They pool their money and smarts and soon hit it big. Putting a snag in their festivities is the arrival of Elizabeth or “Betsy” (Claudette Colbert), Shorty’s sweetheart from back home. She arrives to see him but falls in love with Big John instead, and they are married the night they met. A year passes and when Shorty thinks that Big John is not treating Betsy right, the two men come…
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May Movie of the Month: Boom Town (1940)
This month, Clark Gable is a womanizin’ oil chaser, Spencer Tracy is his long-suffering best pal, Claudette Colbert is his best girl, and Hedy Lamarr is his sidedish in Boom Town. Gable is “Big John” McMasters and Tracy is “Square John” Sand, or as Big John calls him right from the beginning, “Shorty”. They are two wildcatters out west trying to strike oil. They pool their money and smarts and soon hit it big. Putting a snag in their festivities is the arrival of Elizabeth or “Betsy” (Colbert), Shorty’s sweetheart from back home. She arrives to see him but falls in love with Big John instead, and they are married…
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Gossip Friday: Covered in Oil
From December 1940: Clark Gable says he hopes he’ll never, NEVER have to play the role of a garbage-collector. Not that garbage-collectors aren’t very nice people, in their place–but look a what happened to Gable for playing that oil-man role in Boom Town- From his fans, since the picture, Clark has gotten a slough of gifts reflecting the oil-fields role. Among the presents are miniature oil derricks, nearly 500 pictures of old gushers and old boom towns, samples of crude oil in every conceivable type of bottle and flask and container, books about oil, souvenirs from famed oil fields and wells, nearly tons of oil shale, paper-weights and other gadgets…
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Gossip Friday: Always the Business Man
From June 1940: Clark Gable hasn’t enough to do–with his twenty-five costume changes in “Boom Town”–but has even gone in for technical advertising, as well! Gable was an oil field worker himself, way back when, so one day on the set he offered a few tips to the director and was promptly encouraged to give out more. “Not for nothing,” said Gable. “Okay, I’ll buy your lunch,” offered the director. “Lunch and a bottle of beer,” said Gable, always the business man.
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Gossip Friday: Clark’s Stand-in
From July 1940: On the set of “Boom Town”, Mickey Rooney dropped by for a visit with his idol, Clark Gable. Gable was doing a scene with Hedy Lamarr, in which the weeping actress threw herself down on a couch. Gable was supposed to come up to Hedy, pat her on the shoulder and tell her how much he loved her. The scene was just getting underway when Mickey arrived on the set, and Gable motioned to him to take his place. Imagine Hedy’s surprise when she heard Mickey’s voice, quivering from sheer nerves, saying, “I love you.” She turned quickly and burst into laughter, which Mickey blushed to the…
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Gossip Friday: Boom Town Pranks
From August 1940: You may have read about Clark Gable getting a split lip in a fight scene for “Boom Town” and how the studio had to give him a few days to let it heal. Here’s the sequel to the story, which contains a typical Hollywood chuckle. Gable was called on for the closeups after the fight some time later, and after a fake blow at close quarters, when the scene was in the can, he grinned and carelessly spit out a tooth! Everyone saw the blank space in his front row of teeth and consternation reigned. When Clark had enjoyed his joke, he revealed that he had painted…
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Gossip Friday: On the set of Boom Town
From September 1940: Here’s mud in your eye! Being a movie star does have its unpleasant moments, too. For example, in “Boom Town”, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable do a sequence in which they meet in a wooden plank stretched over a mud-hole. Each tries to make the other get out of the way. In the course of this scuffling, someone starts shooting down the street and both, for safety’s sake, dive headlong into the mud. Coming up first, Clark good naturedly tries to shake hands with Spencer, who says, “Aw nuts!” and walks away. Mud-holes are nothing new to Clark. He did a nosedive into one in “Too Hot…