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.
Interesting perspective, Bruce; thanks for doing this.
Glad you liked it. Pretty sure this is the best place to find Carole Lombard box office numbers…they are pretty hard to locate.
Awesome look at Carole’s career. Like how all the information is right there,
Hey Thompson….glad you like my latest page….it is off to a good start….even holding off Ben Stiller from the top trending spot. Thanks for the nice words.
Hi
I’ve only seen about 5 Carole Lombard movies. 20th Century which I barely remember. My Man Godfrey which I thought was so-so. Mr and Mrs Smith, which I watched last year, considering it was Hitchcock, I was disappointed.
There’s dark humour that runs through many Hitchcock movies, I’m surprised he didn’t try a black comedy like Arsenic and Old Lace. Lombard would have been perfect casting.
To Be or not to be is a fantastic film and was a great swan song for her. But my favourite has to be Nothing Sacred. It is genuinely funny and really stands the test of time. She looked lovely in colour. Her early death was a real tragedy for Gable and they say he really never got over it.
For anyone interested, Nothing Sacred is really worth looking up.
Hey Chris…you, me and Steve have each seen 5 Lombard movies….and they look like they are 80% of the same movies. Meanwhile Flora sits at 20. So our combined total is 15….not sure about you…..but that totals makes me feel like I do not watch enough classic movies.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith is probably the least unlike Hitchcock movie out there….I think Lombard and Cary Grant would have made that movie better….then again it almost has the same story as Grant’s The Awful Truth.
I have yet to see Nothing Sacred…but after writing this page it is now on my list of movies to watch. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts on Carole Lombard.
That should be The Princess Comes Across.
You are on a roll….we will have to put you on the payroll….lol. Thanks for the catch….it has been fixed,
Those Harrison Reports seem similar to a forgotten magazine called Box Office. I have somewhere a couple of the year end wrap up issue that do similar ratings for the years by studio, like 1961 and 1962. They also list everything the studios planned to release. This was interesting to me since one found for instance that Columbia Pictures was still issuing serials (albeit re-issues of old ones) and re-issues of Three Stooges shorts.
Hey Dan…one of the benefits of searching and searching and searching for box office information….is that every once in awhile you find some pretty cool stuff. I have seen some of those old Box Office magazines….man was I so disappointed when Box Office magazine has no box office numbers. I am trying to get some information out of USC in California….so far that has not worked….they are willing to share some information with me…but I have to be there in person….it is sadly 3000 miles away. Just recently I realized that the second biggest library in the world is only 2.5 hours away….the Library of Congress might have some interesting stuff. Planning a day trip to Washington DC very soon. Another link that you might like is this one….tons and tons of stuff to look through. http://mediahistoryproject.org/
Interesting information, thanks for the read! She had her own since of unique presence that made people like her. That is missing from many of the current actors. Wow never knew she was married to William Powell.
Hey Romance 1944….excellent comment…and something I agree with 100%. Thanks for visiting our Lombard movie page.