Clark Gable Movies

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in 1934's It Happened One Night -
Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in 1934’s It Happened One Night –

Want to know the best Clark Gable movies?  How about the worst Clark Gable movies?  Curious about Clark Gable’s box office grosses or which Clark Gable movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Clark Gable movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Clark Gable (1901-1960) appeared in 14 movies in uncredited parts from 1924-1930. In 1931 things started to turn around for Gable and his career. Four big things happened for him. (1st) He got his first screen credit in the long forgotten, The Painted Desert. (2nd) He received strong reviews in supporting roles in A Free Soul and The Secret Six. (3rd) He co-starred with Joan Crawford twice that year….they would end up starring in eight movies together and (4th) Gable ended 1931 with his first starring role in Sporting Blood.

Gable would end the 1930’s having starred in three of the biggest films of the decade...It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty and of course Gone With The Wind….all three of these movies won the Oscar® for Best Picture of the year. 

Clark Gable would appear on Quigley Publishing’s Annual Top Ten Money Making Stars sixteen times. Only John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise and Gary Cooper have appeared more times on that poll. During World War II, Gable flew several combat missions over Germany. After the war ended, he would appear in 21 more movies, the last being 1961’s The Misfits co-starring Marilyn Monroe. Clark Gable died two weeks after finishing the film of a massive heart attack, he was 59. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable the seventh greatest male actor of all time.

His IMDb page shows 82 acting credits from 1923-1960. This page will rank Clark Gable movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, cameos and his uncredited or bit roles were not included in the rankings.

Clark Gable and The Three Stooges on the set of 1933's Dancing Lady
Clark Gable and The Three Stooges on the set of 1933’s Dancing Lady

Clark Gable Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.

Clark Gable 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 Clark Gable movies by co-stars of his movies.
  • Sort Clark Gable movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Clark Gable movies by yearly adjusted domestic box office rank
  • Sort Clark Gable movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Clark Gable movie received.
  • Sort Clark by movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • Use the search and sort buttons to make this table very interactive.  For example type in “Joan Crawford” in the search box…and up pop the 8 Crawford/Gable movies.

Clark Gable Adjusted World Wide Box Office Grosses

Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe is 1961's The Misfits
Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe is 1961’s The Misfits

The Best of Clark Gable

#5 Boom Town (1940) is about rival oil-well drillers(Gable and Spencer Tracy) who fight over women and business interests over a twenty year span. The Gable/Tracy team made three very successful movies. The average gross of the three Gable/Tracy movies was 241 million in adjusted for inflation dollars. The other two movies were Test Pilot and San Francisco.  After the success of Boom Town, Tracy started insisting on the same top billing clause in his contract that Gable had enjoyed, effectively ending one of cinema’s most famous screen teams. Gable also co-starred with Joan Crawford 8 times, Myrna Loy 7 times, Jean Harlow 6 times and Lana Turner 4 times during his career.

#4 San Francisco (1936) Centered around the 1906 San Francisco earthquakes, this movie was the biggest box office hit of the year as well as a Top 10 film of the entire 1930s. It was nominated for 6 Oscars® including nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor for Spencer Tracy.  Gable felt Tracy should have gotten a Best Supporting Actor nomination since Tracy’s name was beneath the movie title in the credits. Legendary silent film director, D.W. Griffith, helped direct the famous earthquake sequence. It is rumored that Spencer Tracy is the person that gave Clark Gable his famous nickname “The King of Hollywood”.  One day he saw Gable walking on the set and said “Oh look here comes the King”. 

#3 It Happened One Night (1934) Clark Gable won his only Oscar® for this movie. Movie is one of three movies to win the Big Five major Academy Awards® (actor,actress,director, movie,and screenplay). The other two…..1975’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and 1991’s Silence of the Lambs.  To promote the movie, Gable was required to introduce the movie for each showing for two days at a pre-selected theater. Can you imagine Tom Hanks hanging out at your local theater, so he could talk about his movie before each showing for an entire weekend?  At the time, a standard practice was to release movies in packages of five movies (one popular movie and four duds) at the same time.  Then to figure out how much money a single movie earned at the box office they would take the total and divide by 5.  This practice made reaching profitability clauses in contracts almost impossible to reach, and on this particular movie, the director, Frank Capra, was not paid his bonus due to that clause.  It Happened One Night was actually much more popular than the studio books led to believe.

#2 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)  One of the biggest hits of the 1930s. Mutiny on the Bounty won only one Oscar®, but it was Best Picture of the Year. Gable, Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone were all nominated for Best Actor Oscars® for this movie. This is the only time three actors have been nominated for Best Actor for the same movie. They all lost to Victor McLaglen’s performance in The Informer. For Gable it was his 2nd nomination for Best Actor Oscar® nomination. One of the last times Gable was seen on screen without his famous mustache.  Clark Gable was not the first or last actor to play Fletcher Christian.  Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson have all taken away the Bounty from Captain Bligh in other films.  For my money Mutiny on the Bounty is easily the best adaptation of the story of The Bounty.  And I think the difference is the team of Gable and Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh

#1 Gone With The Wind (1939).  Gone With The Wind is the all-time box office champ when using inflated grosses. It’s current estimated box office total is 1.7 billion dollars in North America…yes billion not million. When looking at total worldwide gross the number falls a little under 3 billion. Gone With The Wind was re-released numerous times over the years(believe it or not…VCRs and DVD players were not around).  So not only is Gone With The Wind the number one movie of 1940 and 1941. It finished as the number 10 movie in 1947, number 4 in 1954, number 9 in 1961. It’s final major re-release was in 1974 with an additional 70 million in box office. Gable received his third Oscar® nomination for Best Actor, but lost to Robert Donat. Gone With The Wind did win the Oscar® for Best Picture of the Year as well as 7 other Oscars® . I think it is safe to say….”That frankly we do care about this movie”.

Check out Clark Gable’s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

Check Out Steve’s Clark Gable epic You Tube page.

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132 thoughts on “Clark Gable Movies”

  1. @Cogerson…I can’t imagine anyone but Clark Gable in the role of Rhett Butler. He certainly deserved an Oscar for “It Happened One Night”, a terrific comedy, but they missed the boat when they didn’t give him Oscar for Rhett.

    Great work on old Hollywood!

    Reply

    1. Hey Barbsbitnpieces. I am currently researching my next goldie oldie Gary Cooper….and one of the books I am reading says Cooper passed on the movie because he was convinced it was going to be the worst flop of all time…and he was glad that Clark Gable was going to be the one stuck with Gone With The Wind…..Cooper made lots of great choices in his career…but I think he missed this one. Gable got robbed when he did not win an Oscar for Gone With The Wind….Robert Donat took home the Oscar gold that year…for a movie, Goodbye Mr. Chips, that not many people talk about anymore. Thanks for checking out my Gable page

      Reply

      1. @Cogerson…Thanks to you, too, for your wonderful work that brings back such good memories!

        I knew Gary Cooper passed on “Gone With the Wind”…good choice, because he was too laid back to play Rhett. Gable had the perfect persona and the just right grin for Scarlett O’Hara’s beau.

        My Cooper favorite is “The Fountainhead”. Based intelligently on Ayn Rand’s novel, it was not a box office bonanza, but it later garnered more respect for its storyline and the acting of three great stars, Cooper, Patricia Neal (his real-life lover on the side, by the way), and Raymond Massey. Of course, “High Noon” and “The Pride of the Yankees” are good ones that I have. He was also very good in some comedic roles that called for a quiet character.

        Reply

        1. I am getting close to finishing the research on Cooper, then I will be writing his page. I can tell you that The Fountainhead finished as the 39th biggest box office hit of 1949. Which as you wrote was not a box office bonanza. I had to start with Cooper’s first talkie, as his silent movies of the 1920s pretty much have vanished with the exception of 1927’s Wings…which one the first Oscar for best picture….thanks for the Cooper thoughts.

          Reply

    1. Hey moreboxoffice….my information comes from lots of resources…box office mojo, IMDB, old Variety magazines, and lots of reading ….thanks for reading the Gable page

      Reply

  3. Back in the late seventies my wife and I went to the theatre to see GWTW. It was sold out so we went back the following night. Hard to believe a movie that old still being popular.

    Reply

    1. Hey ruffridyer….talk about a era long gone…..back then they used to re-release movies over and over….and there was no way to ever see the movie until it got re-released…now ….a blockbuster movie comes out in May at the theater and it will be released to DVD in August…..but then some of the classics like GWTW need to be seen on the big screen at the theater…thanks for reading and commenting.

      Reply

  4. Excellent! My favorite Gable film – besides the obvious one “Gone” – is “It Happened one Night.” Great pics of Gable. I love your avatar, too, by the way!

    Reply

    1. Thanks AngelaK….I actually think It Happened One Night is a much more enjoyable movie to watch than the epic GWTW….plus you do not have to clear an entire night to have time to watch all of GWTW and its 4 hour running time. Thanks for noticing my Avatar…that was a fun day…thanks for stopping by

      Reply

  5. Very nicely done, one of the more detailed writings I have ever seen on Gable. Where are you finding the ticket sold information from back in the 1930 time frame?

    Reply

    1. Hey Sinclair…..I use box office rentals from mainly very old Variety magazines….along with reading lots of biographies of the actors I am looking for…..once you find the box office rentals you can calculate the gross then divide by average ticket cost…..there are lots of ticket cost websites out there list prices by each year. thanks for reading and commenting

      Reply

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