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. I found my comment which must have been made back at hubpages. There was no tally and I was interested to know how many of Gable’s films I’d seen – 28 out of 64, nearly half. What is surprising is that only a few of his films are genuinely great movies, compared to other Hollywood greats like Fonda, Stewart and Bogart. Many of these are routine adventure movies and silly comedies. But he did make up for this by starring in the greatest Hollywood movie of them all. 🙂

    I’ve picked the 30 highest rated Gable movies for my latest video. Bruce you have It Happened One Night topping both critics and UMR charts, okay it was Gable’s only Oscar win and a Best Picture winner too. It reached no.2 on my video.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YV1ymAIAs4

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve.
      1. Clark Gable was the very first classic page I ever wrote…..and yes it was back in the HubPages.
      2. So you have seen 28 Gable movies…..I am now up to 20….which has really improved since I first wrote the page.
      3. I think the “new to me” movie I liked the best was Forsaking All Others…..he gives a great performance in that one.
      4. I enjoyed your video…..job well done.
      5. Yes his Oscar win….gave it the edge over GWTW…..but his top 3 are all-time classics.
      Thanks for returning for a repeat visit…it is greatly appreciated.

      Reply

  2. 1 It’s probably well known that it was Spencer Tracy who dubbed Gable “The King”. Conversely though it has been reported that Tracy sulked and became very difficult on the set of Boom Town because MGM had ceded Clark top billing over him (as was the case in their two previous films together, San Francisco and Test Pilot). After Boom Town Tracy’s contract was up for renewal and he insisted on the inclusion of a permanent first billing clause in it; so there were no more Gable/Tracy films..

    2 Joan Crawford and Gable appeared in a large number of films together and Joan had always been billed over Clark [I think that the 30s was a ‘woman’s picture’ era whereas in the 40s the balance of power seemed to shift to the men.]

    3 However the first film that Joan/Clark did together after Gone with the Wind was Strange Cargo and MGM planned to give Gable first billing because of his newly enhanced status. Joan apparently thereupon camped out in front of L B Mayer’s office and would not go away until he had changed his mind – at least partially: Gable was given first billing on the posters for the film and Joan on the screen. Subsequently Clark’s contract was up for renewal and he was given a guarantee of first billing in all his films; so there were no more Crawford/Gable pictures.

    4 The King’s screen persona was usually that of a hard-boiled, often selfish, womanising cynic who primarily looked after only himself. It seems though that in his private life his attitudes might have been somewhat different. For example it is reported that he campaigned for non-segregated toilets on the MGM lots.

    5 My favourite Gable anecdote is the one where Clark was participating in one of his regular card schools when someone came in and told him that United Artists were on the phone and wanted to talk to him about appearing opposite Monroe in The Misfits. He thereupon excused himself to the other players chortling at the same time, “Be back soon. I’m going to scare off these people with an unacceptable fee demand .” When he came back he looked stunned and said to the gathering: “You’re not going to believe it – they’ve agreed.”

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob Roy.
      1. I have read the same thing about Tracy giving Gable that nickname. They made a great screen team…and all of their movies were monster hits….Gable was the star well before Tracy…but as Tracy’s success grew he got a “top billing” clause in his contract…..probably because of his issues with Gable….just sad that they could have made a few other movies together ….but ego got in the way of that happening.
      2. It is interesting how the power shifted from Crawford in the early 1930s to Gable in the late 1930s. 8 movies is pretty impressive. I actually find it strange that their “screen pairing” does not get mentioned more. when people are talking about top screen teams.
      3. Thanks for the behind the scenes stories…I have read about #4…but that is the first time that I have heard about his salary request for The Misfits….good stuff.
      4. Currently Gable is in 2nd place of all actors when it comes to career box office….not sure if anybody besides John Wayne can top these outstanding box office numbers.
      As always…thanks for the comment and the visit.

      Reply

  3. I see that Gable’s page has now been updated. Hooray! Born exactly 75 years after he was.

    I love you discussing in great detail the top 5 movies. I seem to recall that this was your first “dead” actor page and you thought that nobody would be interested in his page and now you see your most popular pages are from the golden age of Hollywood.

    Well, an update on how any movies I have seen: 47 of them, but there are some that I have recorded waiting for me like The Secret Six. Too many movies and not enough time.

    Reply

    1. Yep…another classic page redone. I thought I had all the stats in pretty good shape here….but turns out I had better and more reliable box office numbers on many of his movies. Once again I feel real good about the numbers shown here.

      This was the first “classic” page I wrote….I remember thinking nobody will be interested in this one….boy was I wrong. 47 movies seen….let’s see…I am at…counting…23 for me. Lots of comments here….but I do not see your comment from 2011……that is too bad…because I am real curious what my tally was back then…seems I have been watching lots of Gable movies since 2011….which means my tally was very very low.

      Thanks for the update on your tally count…and thanks for checking out our latest updated page.

      Reply

    1. if TCM didn’t have the same festival every February Mr. Gable could have had a birthday tribute today

      Reply

      1. Happy belated birthday. Hope you had a great day. Welcome to the club. Unless you stayed in the Jack Benny birthday club.

        Reply

        1. That explains why the views on my Clark Gable page jumped yesterday. It even at one point hit the trending section.

          Reply

        2. Thanks…I decided to join the club since I like people knowing I am old enough to have went through school with pen/pencil and paper…

          Reply

      2. Yep I missed his birthday….normally I check out celebrity birthdays and send out a tweet about that birthday. Thanks for the notice…it is greatly appreciated.

        Reply

  5. Great work. Unfortunately, I only saw Clark Gable in one of his movies, Gone With the Wind as the scoundrel Rhett Butler. Unforgettable his line was, “frankly I don’t give a damn.” Well it takes only one movie to impress me and I’ve seen that movie so many times when the movie was redone or recolored many years ago. I don’t even remember if it was originally in black and white, but the recolored version was truly spectacular. Scarlet’s gowns were glowing, but not enough to overshadow Rhett Butler.

    Reply

    1. Hey RichieMogwai….I was right there with you about Gable ….as the only movie I had seen with him was Gone With The Wind….but I can tell you he has other outstanding work just waiting to be discovered. I appreciate you sharing your memories on GWTW….and I agree 100% that the colors just pop off the screen…..and his line is rightly one of the greatest movie lines of all-time. Thanks for the comment.

      Reply

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