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. Sad news to share. Clark Gable’s grandson Clark Gable III has died at the age of 30. He was found unresponsive by his fiance. Cause of death is unknown. He had no prior health issues. I’ve seen none of his work, but he was an actor and TV host.

    Reply

  2. Added Steve’s epic 50 movie Gable You Tube video to the page.

    Nice update on Clark Gable. So I have seen 20 of the movies listed. Favorites include #2 Mutiny on the Bounty, #7 Run Silent, Run Deep, #8 Command Decision #17 A Free Soul and #43 Forsaking All Others…..what a cast. #1 Gone With the Wind and It Happened One Night are classics. Two I am not huge fans of are #6 The Misfits and #30 Idiot’s Delight. Voted up and shared.

    Reply

  3. HI STEVE

    1 Thanks for additional background information.

    2 Gable said that one of the reasons he insisted upon top billing clause when his contract came up for renewal was he was tired of being 2nd billed by MGM to actresses who were not half of the box office star that he was.

    3 The last film in which Clark was 2nd billed across the board was the 1939 Idiot’s Delight, released just before GWTW and as your posters show in Idiot’s Delight Norma Shearer was billed before him.

    4 The following year 1940 he had to share top billing with my Joan in that as I said previously he got first billing on all promotional material and she was billed first on screen and on non-promotional material though I’m not sure how the latter was defined After that he was never less than top billed ANYWHERE so my Joan could be said to be the last star ever to be billed above Gable albeit on only some of the credits.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob Roy…..thanks for sharing the thoughts on Gable and billing. Sadly the multiple movies they made are being forgottten….but back in the 1930s they were the greatest screen couple. Good feedback

      Reply

  4. 1 STEVE When I started watching movies in 1950/51 Gable had made so many films and been around for what seemed so long at the time that I almost thought his career had started in the dark ages and I saw him as the greatest and most indestructible superstar on earth. As it was however his years active [36] were relatively short compared with some of his contemporaries like Jimmy Stewart [59] and The Duke [56].

    2 It was Spencer Tracy who christened Gable the King and that information has always been presented as Old Cantankerous’ tribute to Clark. However reports supplied by WH last year suggest Tracy may have been indulging in peeved sarcasm, though Bruce himself did not claim that. According to Bruce’s reports Tracy was sulking with everybody on the set of Boom Town in 1940 because Gable had been given top billing and Spence was standing chatting to co-workers when Gable walked towards them and Spence said “Oh look – here comes The King!”

    3 Anyway it is always a pleasure to review any profile of such a great star as Gable and your tremendous posters here make it more so and put Clark in the 98% rating club. My favourite ones are To Please a Lady, The King and 4 Queens, Chained, Honky Tonk, Band of Angels, The Hucksters, Hold Your Man, Mogambo, the very raunchy one from Teacher’s Pet with my Doris [shame on her!] Boom Town, Run Silent Run Deep, The Misfits, and It Happened One night.

    4 I’m probably going to get banned from commenting ever again on Lensman videos but I enjoyed the stills as much as the posters of this occasion. There was a marvellous run of 6 stills with Clark alone with in turn Lamarr, Garbo, Lombard, Turner, Crawford and Jane Russell. There were also 3 super lobby cards – Strange Interlude, Possessed and A Free Soul. For good measure I also admired the stills from The Misfits and with Laughton and my notes suggest there was also a raunchy one of “handy” man Gable with Yvonne DeCarlo. “Walter I’ve just dated Yvonne De Carlo –aren’t I lucky!” Bernie Schwartz is reported to have shouted across a crowded city street to Matthau.

    5 You and the Big Boy agree on 4 of Clark’s Top 5 best reviewed flicks in exactly the same order. His 5th is Misfits whilst yours is Red Dust and on this occasion I’m on the side of the “little people” so you win!

    Reply

    1. Hi Bob, thanks for the review, rating, info, trivia and comment, much appreciated.

      So glad you enjoyed the posters, stills and lobby cards.

      This one was a bit bigger than usual, but than again it’s Gable, the King. 😉

      More photos this time, even for a top 50. There are 18 stills in total featuring Gable with his leading ladies – Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Lana Turner, Yvonne de Carlo, Susan Hayward, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Jane Russell, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Movita, Claudette Colbert and Vivian Leigh.

      That’s an impressive line up of actresses, and more lovelies appear in the posters and lobby cards – Barbara Stanwyck, Greer Garson, Ava Gardner, Eleanor Parker, Gene Tierney, Sophia Loren, Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy, Carroll Baker, Deborah Kerr, Marion Davies, Loretta Young, Jeanette MacDonald and Doris Day… phew!

      Three Gable films scored 10 out of 10 – Mutiny on the Bounty, It Happened One Night and Gone With the Wind. Four scored 9 – Mogambo, Red Dust, Command Decision and San Francisco. And ten more scored 8 out of 10.

      Gone With the Wind is numero uno at the IMDB chart, and It Happened One Night was tops at Rotten Tomatoes. GWTW is no.1 on Bruce’s UMR and critics charts and easily tops the box office charts.

      Looking at the posters – Gable is top billed on 37 of the 50 movies on the video.

      Reply

      1. Hey Steve…..just watched, commented and shared your Gable page. Glad we agree on #1…seems it would be a difficult argument to win if GWTW was not first.

        Reply

    2. Hey Bob….good breakdown on Steve’s Gable video….I will have to check that one out in the morning? Good feedback as always.

      Reply

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