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 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
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.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.
For comments….all you need is a name and a comment….please ignore the rest.
Remembering Mr. Gable on his 116th. birthday…. What a number! Yet, some actors have come quite close to reaching that age…dutch actor Johannes “Jopi” Heesters (famous I’m sure only in germany) reached a 108, Lupita Tovar just recently died at 106, German born Luise Rainer (O Lan in The Good Earth) died aged 104 and Olivia de Havilland just turned 100 and seems very much alive.
I always liked Gable, I almost agree with your Top 5, though maybe not with the exact ranking. I would add Red Dust, China Seas, Night Nurse, and of course his swansong The Misfits. I also find some of his Crawford movies quite entertaining and his early pairings with Lana Turner were enjoyable, too. Seems his pairings with Jean Harlow were huge successes in their day!
One final note on him- or rather one of his wives- Carole Lombard was so beautiful! And although he has always been a Ladies man, it seemed that her early death really devastated him.
For the stats: 35 movies watched.
Hey Lupino…yep….116….sad that it has been 56 years since he passed…..he could have give us at least 10 years of movies….heck that would have put him as a possible person for The Godfather.
Two legends are currently over 100….Kirk Douglas and Olivia de Havilland (a Gable co-star). Of his Top 5….I think The Hucksters is out of place….but the stats are the stats….I only plug in the numbers….the results it spits out…are not always agreed on by me. I think the ones you mentioned are good ones with the exception of The Misfits. I did not like that one at all….but in fairness to the movie….I watched it on the night of the day of my vasectomy. Watching it with a bag of frozen pies was not a fun experience….lol.
He was such a pro….all of his screen combinations were awesome….he had great screen chemistry with almost every co-star. This is the first classic page we ever did….at the time I thought it was a waste of time to do (my mother-in-law had suggested it)…..boy was I wrong…this site has quickly become a great source for classic movies.
35 is solid….has me beat by 8….as I am at 27. I did not see other tally counts….but like I said this was the very first classic pages…and tally counts were not done at the time of the release of this page. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
Shhhh- sounds painful! But the thought of a man watching Marilyn with a bag of frozen pies “downstairs” made me giggle…sorry about so little empathy 🙁 Maybe you should give Misfits another chance? It is not a bad movie, albeit certainly not a masterpiece. A great cast, some good characterstudies and a film with a “Message”. The guys have been running down horses all their lives, changing times turned what they’ve been doing from a basically innocent action into something “barbaric” (here my english deserts me, in german I could have expressed much more precisely what I was trying to say).
You are right, Gable would have been able to offer some more good, maybe even great performances had he survived, but then would have others, like Bogart, Cooper, Clift…and Marilyn Monroe. As it is, we have to be happy for their legacy as it is.
Hey Lupino….I remember I watched two movies that night and did not like either one. But it is amazing that watching Misfits stuck in my memory while the other one has faded from memory….though I think the other movie was something about an Art school…Artistic Confidential or something like that. But the frozen peas and The Misfits are in my head forever….glad it got you a laugh….:)
I agree…one day I will give it another chance….just those characters were so unhappy that I find it hard to willingly spend more time with them. Your English was perfect…as I understood what you were meaning. True their legacies are what they are…..but….it is fun to think about possibilities. One of the pages I have been thinking about is a page that assumes….James Dean followed Alec Guinness’ advice and got rid of the car that Guinness said….”That car will kill you”….and that Dean lived a long life and had a 30 to 40 movie career…..with me creating an entire filmography for him. Like his 4th movie would have been The Cobweb….then he would have spent the rest of the 1950s & 1960s battling Newman and McQueen for roles….he think Dean would have taken the role of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof from Newman. Sorry went off track.
Thanks for checking out our Gable birthday page.
Of course you are right, The Misfits is not inhabited by happy people 🙂 But then, other movies aren’t, either, and they are thought of as classics (Think about all the Tennessee Williams dramas…who is happy in there?)
Great idea about the James Dean Page! If you’d add Clift without his accident, then you could intesify the battle for Maggies (gay?) hubby in CAT even more 😉
Personally, I’ve often asked myself what would have happened to Marilyns career had she survived. Would she have gone down the route of her imitators like Mansfield and van Doren, from B to C movies, then foreign movies, nightclub engagements…or would her star status and talent allow her to become more of a Doris Day/Liz Taylor kind of actress in the 60’s? Interesting thoughts on missed possibilities.
Hey Lupino…Tennessee Williams dramas are not a favorite of my either….I find it a chore to watch his dramas and Shakespeare movies that speak in Shakespeare lingo…as I generally stop trying to understand what all the words mean….and just start hoping the movie will be over soon.
At one point I had about 30 movies in my What If James Dean page done….time has since swept those notes away. I think you are correct Monroe would be another awesome fallen star to do that on as well. I think she would have had a successful 1960s….but by the time the 1970s roll around I think she would be dealing with the curse of getting older and losing some of that “mojo”….nobody will ever know…but it sure is fun to take guesses….:)
About Tennessee Williams: I am a huge fan of his work, though the movies are often watered down due to censorship. But, his characters as written for the stage are certainly not happier than their Hollywood counterparts 🙂
I just adore the filmversions of Streetcar named Desire (critically acclaimed) and Glasmenagerie (not a critic’s favorite), since it introduced me to Jane Wyman.
About MM: Maybe you are right about her possible demise in the 70’s, but then, how about a resurrection as the matriarch of one more TV Drama in the tradition of Dallas or Dynasty? Can you imagine Marilyn making Front Pages again all over the world, this time as a TV superstar in the mold of Joan Collins? Endless possibilities…lol!
Hey Lupino…glad you like Streetcar so much. I have watched that movie 3 times…and each time I did not like the movie at all…..and I know it is one of the best movies ever with some of the best performances ever….it just is not my cup of tea……I blame Mr. Williams.
You are right the movies made in the 1950s and early 1960s really changed the story….if you do not know the “gay” subtext of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof…..then the story makes no sense….which I am sure many people in the 1950s did not know about that subtext.
Chris Evans made a Williams movie that actually liked…somewhat at least….and that was The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond….so maybe there is hope for me yet.
Yep….I agree….she would have been a fine addition to Dallas….or The Colbys…or Falcon Crest…the ideas never stop…lol.
Happy birthday to the King of Hollywood. Gone but certainly not forgotten.
Hey Lauren….I agree with you 100%…gone but not forgotten. Thanks for checking out our Gable page.
1 STEVE I was interested in your average score for the 3 Tracy/Gable movies and for the 5 Gable/Harlow movies that you have selected.
Gable/Tracy 3 films –Average Steve 74.9/ Bruce 76.7
Gable/Harlow 5 films- Average Steve 70.5/ Bruce -76.2
2 Bruce lists 6 Gable/Harlow films but you have excluded the 6th which was ironically called The Secret Six though Clark had just a supporting role in it and Beery was the star. However Bruce’s average for all 6 Gable/Harlow films comes down to 73.8 and if you factored in the 6th your Gable/Harlow average would still presumable be below his average. You and Bruce are in total agreement about Clark’s Top 5 films overall –hallelujah!
3. Spellbinding posters as one would expect in relation to a powerhouse like Gable and although it’s hard to choose I’ll go at random for Idiot’s Delight, Call of the Wild, Mogambo and Honky Tonk. Indeed your posters for the latter and The Tall Men have strengthened my conviction that the King should have made more westerns.
4 I loved the black and white still of Gable/Harlow and the closing one of Clark solo though I should add that I’ve always admired Bruce’s miniature of Gable with the 3 Stooges and indeed it has struck me that maybe because we look to the MAESTRO for stats and wider comment and information he doesn’t get enough credit for some of the fine small stills that he produces.
5 MAESTRO Wayne and Harrison Ford are just very slightly ahead of Gable at the top of the grosses column on your 100 Top Stars page but Gable did war service in the years 1943 and 1944 so he made no movies those years and had the war not interrupted his career is it not possible that the King would be ahead of both Hans and the Duke and topped the league? Clark’s 3 movies for the previous two years 1941 and 42 grossed an adjusted $650 million domestically and of course he was always hot property after GWTW. The price of patriotism!
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, comparison and trivia, much appreciated. I am rather surprised you didn’t compare the ratings for the dozen or so Joan Crawford films Gable appeared in. 🙂
Bruce and I have roughly the same scores, but the occasional anomalous anomaly does unfortunately result in a few of Bruce’s scores being way off the mark, for instance The Swarm currently no.1 on Michael Caine’s critics chart, I mean where are your sources from Bruce, what were they thinking? Jaws the Revenge at no.2… I don’t know what to say… [cue Bruce snarling]
Oh wait sorry I had the critics chart in reverse… 😉
Bob, I remember your billings lists where you listed all the top billings for some famous actors. It didn’t seem all that interesting to me because I assumed those actors were top billed in those films anyway. Far better if you had listed the films where these great actors weren’t top billed (after they’d become famous) and by that I mean not the first name on the credits or poster.
For instance John Wayne wasn’t top billed on Stagecoach [cue gasps] Claire Trevor was the top name on that. Boris Karloff not the lead in Frankenstein – Colin Clive was. Karloff wasn’t even named until the end credits. IMDB does a good job of listing actors in original credits order though it does get infuriating when they list the cast in new films in order of appearance or alphabetical order and it’s impossible to tell who the lead is.
1 I always like a quiet January after the Xmas/New year festivities so I didn’t want to stir up another hornet’s nest with John and the Oracle by reintroducing a Gable/Crawford topic and for the same reason I ignored the Gable/ Loy pairings when doing ratings comparisons. In fact I had wanted to do a post on your Gable video sooner but I thought that I’d give the old King a rest for a decent interval.
2I can understand where you’re coming from about the potential for confusion nowadays over billing in films but for old films usually the matter is not a problem for me as in most cases where the major stars are involved I remember the films from years ago either in the cinemas or in TV reruns and I took special note of the billing at the time. However for anyone interested in the matter historically who has not had my opportunities of past observation YOUR video posters are an excellent guide 99 out of 100 times. For example your Tracy presentation charts Spence’s rise with him starting off with smaller billing to Gable in San Francisco, moving on to equal but 3rd billing in Test Pilot, and then to equal second billing to the King in Boom Town after which there were no more Gable/Tracy pics as Old Cantankerous was in a position to refuse to be billed second to anyone.
3 I meant to say I liked the self-depreciating opening quote from the King in your Gable video. He was obviously saying that he depended on the force of his personality rather than technical acting skills. However that should not be taken to mean that he was dismissive of the power of great acting as when he was in his first years at MGM he is reported to have told fellow actors “Watch out for that guy Tracy. He’s good and will steal every scene from you if you let him.” The story is also told that the King got so fed up with Spence’s scene hogging that on one occasion when Tracy kept prolonging matters Clark banged Old Cantankerous’ head against something to bring the scene to an end.
4 The Duke had a counterpart saying to Gable’s that used to be quoted regularly but nobody seems to mention it nowadays. When asked about his acting technique Wayne would say “I don’t act – I react.”
5 Anyway I also meant to say that most of your posters in the Gable video were so new – to me at least – that I thought of the overall presentation as a 9.3/10. Well done.
🙂
Hey Steve….I think most “serious critics” put The Swarm and Jaws The Revenge right up there with Shawshank and Citizen Kane…..lol. Both Wayne and Karloff got famous after those movies were released….putting them on the cover before would have been a risky move for the producers. Good Lensman video talk……are you glad you finally listened and started giving these classic subjects more attention? I have noticed your Videos popping up on some the test searches I do…..in some cases you and I have the 3rd and 4th Google picks on a subject….keep up the good work.
Hey Bob….good to know we agree on the Top 5….one of the benefits of my tables versus Steve’s videos….is I can include all the movies….granted he could too….but a You Tube….the shorter videos get watched more than the longer ones….or so the experts claim. I agree…there are some excellent posters on his video. Glad you like that Gable and The Three Stooges photo….too bad they could not fit Crawford and Astaire in the picture as well….that cast always amazes me.
As for your question….about Gable being number one…..if the war had not taken away years….in theory that is right….but you have to include the 80 B Westerns Wayne made that did not make the page….those 80 might have countered the 4 or 5 Gable movies he missed out on.
I have noticed….none of the classic updates I have been doing….have changed the Top 20 on that Top 100 Stars page or the $100 million hit page (that one I update every time I update a page)…then again…..a Anthony Quinn page update has to be coming soon….and he MIGHT crack the Top 20.
Hey Bob, thanks for the added info on King Gable, enjoyed reading your post, thanks for the rating too.
Hey Bruce, yeah some of my videos have started popping up on the first page of google searches, especially if I add the words ‘highest rated’ or ‘top rated’. Some times a video will turn up on google an hour or two after I upload it, that’s fast.
I agree, Karloff and Wayne were bad examples in my ‘billings’ comment. Ray Milland over John Wayne on Reap the Wild Wind surprised me. Looking at Milland’s previous films, nothing special sticks out and this was before he won the Best Actor Oscar for The Lost Weekend. Yes it’s true I’ve caught the ‘billings’ bug off Bob. 🙂
Hey Steve….even better for you …I am seeing your video in the search results. I am sure Bob is smiling as he sees you talking about billing.
I will gradually through stars on color movies and what I know.
Gable had one color movie prior to 1950–Gone with the Wind
He had eight color movies in the 1950’s beginning with Across the Wide Missouri in 1951. Mogambo in 1953 is the best of these.
Gable also narrated and appeared in his own color documentary production, Combat America, in 1944.
*I notice Gable was not very prolific after the war. I think he had health problems. I have read about his problems with tremors. And he might have had a couple of heart attacks in the years before his fatal attack. Of his 16 movies after 1950, 8 were in color.
Hey John…so for his entire career Clark Gable only had 9 color movies. I think I have seen the majority of those movies…which is why I thought he was going to be among the leaders….well I am happy to now know the correct answer….thanks for sharing this information.
I think the death of Carole Lombard took a very long time for him to overcome….that and his military service took some time to recover as well….but I think when he finally wanted to make films again….he was doing almost 2 movies a year.
Excellent comments….as well as all the other ones you shared….thank you very much. I will be checking out the rest tomorrow morning….this is one tired puppy after going from Alaska to Virginia Beach.
HI STEVE
1 Don’t let John or the Oracle bully you out of taking an interest in billing because your posters are as I have again demonstrated in my Joel McCrea comments today often charting a performer’s rise up the ladder of stardom which presumably would interest not just historians by many movie buffs.
2 Indeed your McCrea video is rich with relevant sign posts in for example also showing Joel rising from unequal to equal billing with Marian Hopkins**. Also to be treasured are your two posters for Dead End starring McCrea and Sylvia Sydney. The earlier one shows Bogie then a nobody being billed in smaller letters below the stars whilst your second one obviously designed to cash in on Bogie obtaining stardom in 1941 actually gives Humph top billing ! At that point Joel and Sylvia probably didn’t have the clout to object and I bet the publicists wouldn’t have dared tinker about in that fashion with one of Old Cantankerous’ top billed posters !
**According to Edward G, Mariam Hopkins was fanatically political and on the set of Barbary Coast both McCrea and especially Mariam made life hell for him over their perception of his politics and drove him to the point where he thumped her. It is therefore ironic in a sense that in Hopkins’ final major Hollywood film and penultimate one overall The Chase in 1966 she was surrounded by as co-stars Mr Mumbles, Bob Redford, Sister Jocelyn Mumbles and Hanoi Jane all of whose politics as I understand them would have been anathema to Mariam
PS Have now watched your McCrea video 3 times and enjoyed it even more so a slight increase to 9.4/10 Tuuly compelling presentation!
Thanks again Bob, is Bruce the Oracle? I’ve noticed that foreign movie posters sometimes have different billings to American ones, probably because the films were released overseas a year or two later and the status of certain actors have changed or because a particular actor is more popular in that country than the real star of the picture.
Thanks again for the rating, glad you enjoyed the video! To quote Lina Lamont “If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes us feel as though our hard work ain’t been in vain for nothin’. Bless you all.” 🙂
STEVE:
1 Unless there are two people masterminding this site [which given its vast out wouldn’t surprise me] Bruce is THE Oracle or Maestro whichever you prefer. However I read once that a Committee actually helped Winston Churchill write his 4-volume History of the English Speaking Peoples so for all we know Bruce could actually be a Committee of up to even 20 people all of whom go under the umbrella name of Bruce Cogerson. That would explain why he wins most of the arguments as the individual can.t beat odds of 20-1 I mean I’ve never actually seen him so to me he is at the very least like Charlie out of the Charlie’s Angels films whose voice was provided by John Forsythe and who is never seen as he masterminds the Angels
2 Sometimes the billing on posters can be different abroad in a country where one of the actors is a local big star. For example In the 1959 film Libel Olivia De Havilland got top billing on posters except in Britain where her English co-star (of Flemish ancestry) Sir Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven Van Den Bogaerde was a very popular matinee idol at the time. Of course you Brits could never accept being 2nd at anything for long and to be fair Sir Dirk did have the larger and more central part in an excellent mystery thriller. Sometimes though after a film’s initial run billing will standardise everywhere.
3 On the set of The Fugitive Kind (1960) apparently Mr Mumbles caused Anna Magnani to break down into hysterical tears in front of cast and crew because as she expressed it “Not even in my native Italy will he let me have top billing!”
Bob, you’re a font of movie knowledge, I salute you. And you can remember all the quotes too!
If you want to see what el supremo Bruce the Oracle looks like there’s a video of him attempting a Michael Caine impersonation, the link is somewhere on this site. I saw it recently.
Interesting thing about poster billings being different and not just in foreign lands, on my William Powell video the poster to Life With Father has Irene Dunne top billed over Powell but on the film itself and at the IMDB Powell is listed first. Maybe the two had different contract deals on billings? Does that happen often?
Hey Steve…the video you mentioned is here…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lu-WkrnJkY Cogerson makes an appearance at the 3:40 mark….I wish I knew the “My Cocaine” trick when I did that video.
🙂
1 The Powell/Dunne billing for Life with Father could have been the kind of arrangement that Lemmon and Curtis had for The Great Race and Stewart/Wayne for Liberty Valance where one star got billed first on screen and the other on posters. I actually read that for the premiere of Life with Father wherever that was the marquee had flashing lights that continually alternated top billing between William and Irene. Irene usually demanded the top spot but in that one William had the title role so I suppose some kind of compromise was necessary.
2 Bruce as he usually does nailed it right I think when he told me in a post some time ago that in the classic era particularly under the old studio system the stars were so tightly bound by contracts and set scales of fees that the only way they could flaunt some sort of independence that distinguished their status was to get the most prominent billing possible.
3 Today I don’t think it is the same big deal as there is so much money on offer for taking cameos, voice roles etc and of course money has its own status. For example according to the Forbes Rich List a few years ago DeNiro was the second wealthiest celeb after Captain Kirk Shatner and DeNiro built up his wealth by seemingly being willing to appear in everything and anything as long as he was given a respectable mention somewhere on the posters and cast lists. The only one in recent time that I can recall making a really big fuss about billing is Tom Cruise who at least in the 1990s usually pissed other actors off by insisting his name alone go above the title. However even he accepted THIRD billing in Lions for Lambs as he was very keen to work with Streep and Redford.
4 Years ago I had a work colleague whose name was Wilson and who was therefore nicknamed Whip after the cowboy actor and who boasted to us that he worked just to keep himself occupied and away from us he had private wealth and a string of beautiful girls in tow. We demanded proof and Whip brought us in a photo of himself sitting on the wall of a minor mansion with his arm round a blonde Monroe-like stunner. We found out later that the house belonged to a local politician and the girl was Whip’s sister. So a clip of some guy calling himself Cogerson and pretending to be Sir Maurice Micklewhite proves little. Maybe we should do a Donald and demand to see Bruce’s birth certificate !!!
Heh heh I wonder if Michael Caine would have been as famous if he kept his birth name?
Thanks again for the billings info, good stuff.
Btw I thought you might want to know they’ve been advertising a new Marlon Brando documentary on BBC2 I think, for this saturday. Might be interesting.
Hey Bob…..well….we have 6 people in the house….which is way short of 20….WoC does all the tech work….KoC (Katelyn of Cogerson …daughter #1) is our editor and grammer expert……and me. The other three pretty much stand around and look pretty….lol.
“My Cocaine”
if you say it out loud it really does sound like you’re saying Michael Caine.
I remember a Simpsons episode where Bart phones up Moe’s Tavern and asks for ‘Hugh Jass’ – I’m actually laughing as I’m typing – the tables were turned on Bart when a customer named Hugh Jass answered the phone. 🙂
Glad you like the My Cocaine hint on who to do an Caine impression….Caine’s voice along with Connery’s might be the most copied voices currently…..seems the days of actors voices being distinctive are long gone….not thinking I have heard any comedians copying Tom Cruise or Daniel Day-Lewis’ voice…..growing up the comedians all did James Stewart, John Wayne and Cary Grant imitations. “)
I thought I was the Maestro….and Dan was the Oracle.
To us lesser mortals you are both though I like Steve’s tag of Supremo and may start using that for variety.
Hey Bob…I think I can live with that….lol….especially since Cogerson is a made up name too….lol.
Clark Gable has 44 films on your list that made 100 million. He has not had a movie released since 1961. He has never been in the top 1000 of the Oracle of Bacon Center of the Hollywood Universe list. These are the only people on the current list who have appeared with him.
Band of Angels (1957) – 912 Arthur Tovey
Chained (1934) – 245 Mickey Rooney
Homecoming (1948) – 912 Arthur Tovey
Manhattan Melodrama (1934) – 245 Mickey Rooney
Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) – 762 Jack Warden
Soldier of Fortune (1955) – 67 James Hong
The Misfits (1961) – 220 Eli Wallach
Wow Clark Gable never been in the Top 1000? I wonder if MGM’s contract system is a reason for that….as Gable appeared in many movies with the same co-stars and supporting actors. At least James Hong is still around…too bad Sophia Loren is not in the Top 100. Not sure who Arthur Tovey is…but a quick IMDb check shows he has been gone for 15 years. Finally I guess I am surprised Burt Lancaster is not with Jack Warden…as Lancaster has starred with lots of actors still working…Costner, Sarandon, Amy Madigan, Rutger Hauer and others. Thanks for taking the time to put this together.