Want to know the best Carole Lombard movies? How about the worst Carole Lombard movies? Curious about Carole Lombard box office grosses or which Carole Lombard movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Carole Lombard movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which ones got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place…. because we have all of that information and much more.
Carole Lombard (1908-1942) was an American actress, who the American Film Institute ranked as one of the Top 50 Screen Legends of all time. Lombard is ranked as the 23rd best actress, right behind #22 Jean Harlow and right before #24 Mary Pickford. One of our goals is to do a movie page on all 50 Screen Legends. After completing this page we have now written movie pages on 46 (or 92%) of those performers……leaving only 3 actresses and 1 actor that still need movie pages.
Her IMDb page shows 80 acting credits from 1921-1942. This page will rank 39 Carole Lombard movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Her silent movies, her shorts and her first three “talkies” are not included. Every Lombard movie from 1930 to 1942 is included in the rankings.
Carole Lombard Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Carole Lombard movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Carole Lombard movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Carole Lombard movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Carole Lombard movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and Oscar® wins each Carole Lombard movie received.
- Sort Carole Lombard movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Use the sort and search buttons to make this table very interactive. For example…if you type in “Cary Grant” in the search box….the 3 Grant/Lombard movies will pop right up.
- Blue Link in Co-Star column will take you to that star’s UMR movie page
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Carole Lombard Table
- Nine Carole Lombard movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 23.08% of her movies listed. My Man Godfrey (1936) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Carole Lombard movie grosses $77.90 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 26 of Carole Lombard’s movies are rated as good movies…or 66.66% of her movies. To Be or Not to Be (1942) was her highest rated movie while From Hell To Heaven (1933) was her lowest rated movie.
- Three Carole Lombard movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 7.69% of her movies.
- Zero Carole Lombard movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 0.00% of her movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00. 21 Carole Lombard movies scored higher that average….or 53.84% of her movies. My Man Godfrey (1936) got the the highest UMR Movie Score while From Hell To Heaven (1933) got the lowest UMR Movie Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Carole Lombard
1. Carole Lombard was born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
2. How Jane Alice Peters became Carole Lombard. After his first screen test….the name “Jane” was considered to “dull”…so her name was changed to Carol. “Lombard” was borrowed from her mother’s close friend Harry Lombard. On the cast credits for 1930’s Safety In Numbers, Paramount Pictures accidentally spelled Carol’s name with a “finale e” and it was decided this this would be the officially spelling of her screen name.
3. Carole Lombard had many nicknames. The Profane Angel. The Hoosier Tornado and The Queen of Screwball Comedy were the most famous. Seems every famous actor or actress had nicknames back then…wonder why current stars do not.
4. Carole Lombard was married to actor William Powell from 1931 to 1933. They fell in love while filming 1931’s Ladies’ Man and 1931’s Man of the World. After their divorce they remained friendly. Powell recommended Lombard for her role opposite him in 1936’s My Man Godfrey. My Man Godfrey would be Lombard’s biggest box office hit and earned her a Best Actress Oscar® nomination (her only nomination).
5. Carole Lombard was married to actor Clark Gable from 1939 to her death in 1942. They first met each other when they were both extras in 1925’s Ben-Hur. Seven years later they starred together in 1932’s No Man Of Her Own…..but their off screen Hollywood romance did not take off until a few years later. Gable and Lombard are entombed together at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
6. Despite being married to the popular actors William Powell and Clark Gable….Carole Lombard considered Russ Columbo the love of her life. Columbo was a famous singer and violinist who died of an accidentally gun wound in 1934.
7. Carole Lombard is considered by many to be the prototype for the icy blondes in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Lombard and Hitchcock made one movie together…..1941’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
8. On January 15, 1942, Lombard sold $2.50 million in war bonds. Her parting words to the crowd were…”Before I say goodbye to you all….come on…..and join me in a big cheer…V for Victory. Those would be her final public words.
9. On January 16, 1942, Lombard headed back to California. She debated on taking a plane or a train. Lombard flipped a coin to decide. At 7:30 PM her plane crashed into Table Rock Mountain. Carole She was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the first woman killed in the line of duty in World War II. FDR greatly admired her work for the war effort.
10. Lucille Ball said she finally decided to go ahead with I Love Lucy when Carole Lombard, who had been a close friend, came to her in a dream and recommended she take a chance on the risky idea of entering television. This was almost 10 years after Lombard’s death.
Check out Carole Lombard’s movie career compared to current and classic stars on our Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time page.
America Film Institutes’ Top 25 Screen Legend Actress and UMR’s Links That Rank All Of Their Movies.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Golden Globes® are the registered trademark and service mark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
hello,
it is time to say i like her very much, she is the queen of screwball comedy and one of the most beautiful stars of the 30.
She is not replaced to day like Dietrich.
my favorite film is TO BE OR NOT TO BE by Lubistch, a master in comedy.
I know she disapear in a crash plane too young and like for Harlow and Monroe it is something cruel and we never know why it s happen.
she was a queen at Paramount with Dietrich and Mae West in front of Cooper Grant and Philips Holmes who i think to day is in shadows. She made several films with Fred Mac Murray and one with Gable at the beginning of the 30 and she was simply great in all the films.
and of course she was a legendary couple with Gable and when you see them on photos they look simply like a King and a Queen.
have a good tim
Pierre
1 An adjusted domestic gross of $3 billion was in my opinion a good return for just 13 years of stardom following a near decade of silent films in which Carole had supporting roles and/or was uncredited and of course in many of her 39 movies in the table above she was THE star.
2 I was pleased to see My Man Godfrey as No 2 for critic and audience. This site and I are agreed that it was superior to the Niven version because great performer as David was Powell excelled in the Godfrey type role and of course June Allyson was no Carole. However after watching Sir M as Bruce Wayne’s Alfred I always thought that HE could have made a passable fist at Godfrey ***. Maurice can be funny as some of the Alfie scenes demonstrate “I used to sneak in and make love to her when her young man was away at his bodybuilding classes!”
3 I liked the little stills and I see one of Grant & Lombard as a collector’s item. I would be surprised that the Lombard & Barrymore one got past the censors if it was in the public domain in the early Classic Era.
***Certainly I feel that Sir M would have been a match for O.W. Fischer who was originally signed for the Niven version but lost his memory during filming and was replaced by David.
Hey Bob…..thanks for checking out our Lombard update…..I think the update made her career look much more successful and accurrate than the old way he calculated box office and our UMR ranking.
I agree…3 million is pretty darn impressive…especially since she did not have a monster hit…to make reaching that level easy. Only one movie (My Man Godfrey)
over $150 million.
She and Powell made a great team in Godfrey….I have not seen the Niven version….so I will have to take your mini-review as gospel. Glad you liked the photos we found…..and I of course enjoy all your compliments on Sir Mike. His song “Micheal Caine” with Madness was playing on the radio during our drive today…..in the song Caine comes on and says….,My name is Michael Caine……he does it 4 or 5 times in the song….a talented man…..lol.
Thanks for stopping by.
Wouldn’t TO BE OR NOT TO BE should be considered to be a $100m benchmark? Let’s see.
$100.000.000/ $8.65(2017 ticket price)=11,560,694 tickets soldx.29cents = $3,352,601/100=33526×35% =$1,173,410. TO BE OR NOT TO BE was reported as $1.5m box office rental/35%=42,857×100= which should make $4,285,700/.29=14.778,276(tickets)x$8.65=$127,832,087.
Hey Kevin….that is close to the calculations my data base has as well….$125.00 million in adjusted gross….I just have not updated Lombard’s page. She was one of the last pages I completed before switching the formulas. At this point I had started to add in the UMR links to the co-star column. If you go to my $100 million movie page…https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/100-million-movies-1930-2015/ You will see a massive table…all the stars with a link are completed….I think I am about 87% done with switching these movies over. Thanks for keeping me on my toes. 🙂
Hi Bob, thanks for checking out my ‘saucy’ Carole Lombard video. I watched To Be Or Not To Be again recently, have to confess I prefer the Mel Brooks remake (Bob gasps) well I saw that one several times on video during the 80s and long before I finally saw the original. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. 🙂
Sadly Lombard’s life ended tragically in a plane crash in Nevada, she was just 33. Gable must have been inconsolable. Are airplanes the safest way to travel? Looking at recent news events… I dunno…
Fred MacMurray is everywhere! I’m still shocked! Is there anyone he hasn’t acted with? And I thought he only did Disney comedies in the 60s. 😉
1 I knew all about Gable and Lombard of course and sadly nowadays many people mention Carole only when they talk about Gable.
2 Until I read Bruce’s page though I never knew she and William Powell were married. Bill is like Fred only he seems to get around the ladies on screen and off! BOB
PS As you will have guessed my last post is intended for John – apologies again.
William Powell and Clark Gable were also very close to Jean Harlow who died just a few years before Lombard, aged 26.
Thanks again – all new to me BOB
Hey Bob….William Powell was quite the ladies man….he was dating Jean Harlow when she passed away….was married to Carole Lombard….and was attached to many other Hollywood beauties….I guess The Thin Man had some mojo….lol.
As Carole’s films were largely confined to the 1930s she was a back number when I started watching movies in the 1950s and I have actually seen just 3 of her films in repeats – Bolero, To be or Not to be and Now and Forever. So your Lombard video was more educational for me that usual in that I was able to pick you from your posters the kind of general career that she had and that she was quite a star in her own right with a goodly number of top-billed/stand-alone movies.
OTHER COMMENTS
(1) Fine posters for My Man Godfrey, Supernatural, 20th Century, an arousing saucy one for Virtue and quite honestly one of your very best for the Eagle and the Hawk despite Grant not being in it. (2) Joan Crawford said that “To really appreciate Gable you had to know him without the moustache. Your Gable/Lombard still and Bruce’s miniature are therefore collector’s items (3) I also like very much the still of Cooper, Lombard and little Shirley. The young Coop didn’t seem as wooden as usual – or maybe John’ starting to get inside my head! (4) you and Bruce are in sync about 4 of the Top 5 but for once both of you have those 4 in the same order (5) To be or Not to be deserves to be top and my knowledge of the reputation of the remainder of the Top 5s of both of you means I have no quarrel with either of you (6) a 9.0 for openers but raised to 9.3 for the three MacMurray films. Boy he was some dapper leading man in those days!
More fine Bob comments on Steve’s Carole Lombard video….so people will know what you are talking about…here is Steve’s video link… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7nfv1TX20