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Gossip Friday: Runaway Race for Rhett?
From February 1937: ...I note that Joan Crawford is gaining strong support for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, that Melvyn Douglas and Franchot Tone are threatening Leslie Howard’s lead in the race for Ashley’s role and that Clark Gable’s runaway race for the part of Rhett Butler is stirring up determined opposition. Those who want Clark can see nobody else in the role–those who don’t wax pretty savage in their counterblasts. As, for instance: “All I can say is ‘Heaven forbid Gable in the role of Rhett!’ and you can tell the horde who had the stupidity to choose him that they had better read the book over again. Such…
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Movie of the Week: Any Number Can Play (1949)
This week, Clark is a gambling house owner and Alexis Smith is his loving wife in Any Number Can Play (1949). Clark is Charley King, the owner of a gambling house in New York. After being diagnosed with a heart problem, he begins to re-evaluate his life: his relationship with his wife (Smith) and teenage son (Darryl Hickman), his business and his associates. Clark learns in the first few minutes of the film (from his doctor who smokes a cigarette and drinks liquor while he tells him) that he has angina pectoris, a heart condition brought on by stress (so the doctor says). Ironically, Clark’s fifth wife, whom he would…
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Gossip Friday: Scarlett O’Hepburn
From November 1938: “Idiot’s Delight” with Norma Shearer and Clark Gable, is pushing toward the finish line and Gable expects to rest over the Christmas holidays in preparation for a prospective start on “Gone with the Wind,” shortly after the first of the year. Gable and others predict that Katharine Hepburn will be announced shortly for the Scarlett O’Hara role. ___ I like Hepburn and all, but it’s hard to imagine that she was seriously considered for the part.
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Movie of the Week: Adventure (1945)
Gable’s Back and Garson’s Got Him in this week’s Movie of the Week, Adventure (1945). After Carole Lombard died in January 1942, the widowed King of Hollywood halfheartedly completed Somewhere I’ll Find You and retreated from public view. Gossip items popped up here and there, announcing he’d star in this film or that film, but none came to fruition. Instead the public saw their haggard-looking King being sworn into the Army Air Corps in August 1942, wearing the same suit he wore to his wife’s funeral. Clark Gable had reigned over Hollywood for eleven years at this point; in the early 1930’s he starred in several films a year. Now…
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Gossip Friday: What a Smash
From February 1937: When they were making “Love on the Run,” Mr. Clark Gable also had lines to learn, walked around the set uneasily, rumpling his hair and glaring at Miss Crawford, who was innocently playing her operas. He suddenly walked over to her, picked up her pile of records, flung them on the floor, smashed them to flinders and said: “There! How do you think anybody can learn lines with all that racket!” He then quietly walked away and Miss Crawford either wept or looked about to. It was one of Gable’s japeries. He had bought a lot of dime records to smash.
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{New Article} 1956: The Brave Lovers
This article is from 1956, when Clark Gable and fifth wife Kay Williams Spreckels had been married less than a year. It’s one of those that I’m not really sure what the point of it is. Also they picked the weirdest photo for the main page of the article; it’s him helping her out of a chair and she’s hunched over and not looking at the camera (See for yourself). Anyway. Clark Gable and his wife Kay have had more than their share of trouble in their lives. But fate waited until now, when they thought there was nothing but peace ahead, to deal them the hardest blow. Their big…
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Movie of the Week: Men in White (1934)
This week, Clark Gable is a workaholic intern at a hospital and Myrna Loy is his neglected fiance in Men in White. Clark is George Ferguson, a medical intern at a prestigious New York hospital. He is serious about his profession and works night and day. During this time period, medical interns and nurses even lived at the hospital, having little time for social lives. Myrna Loy is his heiress fiance, Laura, who flits around being frustrated that he has no time for her. (I’m not quite sure how they even found time to date and get engaged when he’s seemingly always working?) She wants him to open up his…
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Remembering Clark Gable
Clark Gable died 58 years ago today after suffering a heart attack. He was 59 years old. You can read about his death and funeral here. From the Associated Press, November 17, 1960: Doctors Give Details on Death of Clark Gable Hollywood–Clark Gable’s doctors say the actor was recovering from one heart attack when a second blood clot took his life in a matter of seconds. Details of the famed actor’s death were made public Thursday as plans were made to entomb him beside the body of Carole Lombard, the third of his five wives. Private services will be conducted Saturday at 9am in the Church of the Recessional,…
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Movie of the Week: The Misfits (1961)
This week, because Friday is the 58th anniversary of Clark Gable’s death, our movie is, of course, his final film: The Misfits (1961). Clark Gable is Gay Langland, an aging cowboy in Reno who avoids responsibility and anything tying him down. He and his buddy Guido (Eli Wallach) run into Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe), a depressed ex-dancer who is in Reno getting a divorce. She’s been staying with Isabelle (Thelma Ritter) to establish her residency requirement for the divorce, a very common practice. They all have nowhere to be and no one to answer to, so they decide to head out to Guido’s house in the Nevada desert. Although Guido actively…
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{Photos} We Salute Hollywood at War!
This photo spread appeared in Modern Screen magazine in 1942. We Salute Hollywood at War! In H’wood, morale isn’t just a pretty face. It’s laughs for the homesick–blood for the wounded–millions for guns! Clark Gable, anxious to shake off old ties, get into the Big Scrap, took 11 months of stiff training and blisters to earn his gold Lieut.’s bars. Jim Cagney succeeded him as Chairman of the actors’ division of the H’wood Victory Comm. And believe us, nobody has to ask what Hollywood is doing in this war! To date, its War Bond sales amount to $838,250,000! Among the things that…