They Had Faces Then #4

Yvette has reminded me that Clark Gable was born on 1st February in 1901.

I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss it but I’ve never seen his most famous picture, Gone with the Wind. However, I do cherish his performance as Peter Warne in It Happened One Night. To me, it’s one of the great comic performances of the 1930s, in one of that era’s most delightful films. Just thinking about his rules of hitch-hiking makes me smile!

Myrna Loy, who acted with Gable several times (and rejected his advances a number of times too!), recalled, “He loved poetry, and read beautifully, with great sensitivity, but he wouldn’t dare let anybody else know it.”

Loy and Gable made a great screen pairing, especially in Manhattan Melodrama, Test Pilot and Wife vs. Secretary (how I relish the name of that movie!).

Loy, Gable and Jean Harlow in Wife vs. Secretary (Clarence Brown, 1936)

Dead as Dillinger

“They [MGM] put me right to work in Manhattan Melodrama, which precipitated the demise of John Dillinger, Public Enemy No. 1. FBI agents shot him down outside the Biograph Theatre, in Chicago, after he’d seen the film. Supposedly a Myrna Loy fan, he broke cover to see me. Personally, I suspect the theme of the picture rather than my fatal charms attracted him, but I’ve always felt a bit guilty about it, anyway. They filled him full of holes, poor soul.”

- Being and Becoming (1987), Myrna Loy & James Kotsilibas-Davis, p. 87.

[photograph via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger]