Bestof BEST CLARK GABLE MOVIES
“Red Dust” (1932): Gable and Jean Harlow sizzled, in all ways, in this drama of passion on a rubber plantation in Indochina.
“It Happened One Night” (1934):
Director Frank Capra’s all-time comedy great is the prototype of the “road movie,” with an Oscar-winning Gable as a reporter pursuing a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert, who also earned an Academy Award).
“Call of the Wild” (1935): The Jack London novel got a faithful retelling in large part via Gable’s embodiment of Yukon-destined adventurer Jack Thornton.
“Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935):
Gable’s Fletcher Christian opposes Charles Laughton’s tyrannical Captain Bligh on the high seas in this classic saga.
“San Francisco” (1936): The city’s 1906 earthquake — superbly re-created with relatively primitive special effects — reunites two dissimilar friends from childhood, a gambler (Gable) and a priest (Spencer Tracy).
“Saratoga” (1937): The upstate New York horse-racing haven is the backdrop for an entertaining rematch of Gable and Harlow.
“Test Pilot” (1938): Gable is at the controls in this story of a risk-taker who may — or may not — be tamed by his sudden marriage.
“Gone With the Wind” (1939): Well, of course. It’s a movie-industry legend that the public “demanded” that Gable play novelist Margaret Mitchell’s roguish Civil War-era hero Rhett Butler ... and the sparks he generated with Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara has proven their wish the right one in all of the epic’s re-releases and telecasts since. Turner Classic Movies presents it
Sunday, April 14, on the exact 30th anniversary of the channel (where this was the first film it showed).
“Honky Tonk” (1941): Wanting to rule a town, a con man (Gable) assumes an alter ego and feigns honesty while battling a crooked lawman.
“The Hucksters” (1947): A war-veteran ad man (Gable) finds potential romance by enlisting a military widow (Deborah Kerr) for a campaign.
“Command Decision” (1948): One of the greatest war movies casts Gable as an aerial leader enmeshed in politics while trying to stop the manufacture of German jets. “Mogambo” (1953): This remake of Gable’s own “Red Dust” relocates the story to Kenya and makes Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly his dual love interests.