Truly Dreadful Film

Sorry, this movie sucks

hyped garbage

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

I just watched this schlockfest on Encore. In the 1970s I read the reviews panning it, and so I never saw it until tonight.Screenwriter Barry Sandler slapped together the script for "Gable and Lombard." If you don't recognize Sandler's name, he is also the writer of one of the most famously awful movies of all time, "Making Love." Although presenting a gay-themed love story was a bold move during the early Reagan years, it was severely criticized, not so much for its subject matter but for its cringe-inducing dialogue. The same holds true for "Gable and Lombard." Marvelous, vividly colorful cinematography is wasted on a poorly written and largely imaginary "biopic" of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. In the background, the incessant repetition of Michel Legrand's trite, syrupy theme grows tiresome very fast. As for the characters' screwball action, stretched out for 132 specious minutes, no better adjective than "trashy" applies. But Sandler saves the worst for last. Gable, resplendent in his Air Force uniform (he didn't actually enlist until AFTER Lombard's death) sits under a tent near the site where Lombard's plane has crashed, killing everybody on board. Gable says that he wants to go up to find her, but his fictional good buddy Ivan Cooper, who has been holding his hand for practically the entire film, convinces him to leave, saying, "She wouldn't want you to remember her that way." Obediently, Gable immediately leaves in a green sedan. The movie should have ended right there. However, in a REALLY classy move, Sandler decides to depict the grief-stricken Gable telling the driver a filthy anecdote, after which the camera pans out and the soppy Legrand theme rises for the last time over the credits. This moment left me stunned. Even if it were true--which by all accounts it wasn't--why leave us with an obscene final impression of Clark Gable? It's not merely preposterous, but beyond disgusting. It would have been more poignant to go with the truth, which is that Gable was prevented from hiking up with the search team to look for his wife, and remained in the area for days while the team dug through the wreckage. He is quoted as saying, "They never let me go to the crash site," and spent the rest of his life sending searchers back to look for Carole's wedding ring, which was never found. There is so much more that Sandler could have done with this story and didn't. Choosing scatology over dignity, he put a toilet-paper ribbon on his Technicolor package of lies about people who meant little more to him than cartoon characters, and flung it at the audience, flipping the bird in farewell.

In addition to the points made by other viewers, one of the historically most out of place scenes comes at the end, when "Carole" tells "Clark" that the radio news just reported that Corregidor has fallen and MacArthur left the Philippines. Trouble is that the real Carole was killed January 16, 1942, two months before MacArthur left Corregidor (March 11) and almost four months before it surrendered (May 6, 1942). The real Clark had suggested his wife for a war bond tour because he was in the middle of making a film with Lana Turner. He volunteered for military service out of guilt over her death and the scene at the end in a military camp (as well as the opening scene, both of which have him in uniform) is pure invention. There is a lot more that could have been done in playing out this love story, and unfortunately, Clayburgh's portray of the character emphasizes her vulgar side but not her very human one. I hope they do a remake of this some day and pay more attention to the facts, which are compelling enough on their own. Gable worshiped his wife and collapsed emotionally after she died.

Slammed by critics in 1976 for playing loosely with the Hollywood facts (to put it mildly), this expensive, handsome-looking bio-pic regarding the romance between 1930s screen idols Clark Gable and Carole Lombard actually doesn't take the facts into consideration at all. Perhaps starting with the presumption that nobody knows the real dish, screenwriter Barry Sandler concocts a movie star yarn around personalities we mostly remember today through their pictures. Of course, film-historians were quick to point out all the inaccuracies, but I don't think Sandler nor director Sidney J. Furie was preoccupied with the truth. Sandler's Gable and Lombard appear to be based solely on his (and our) movie memories of them both, and leads James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh approach their roles in this precise spirit (particularly Clayburgh, who models her performance on Lombard's performance in "My Man Godfrey"). In a way, this was a novel concept considering that 1930s reality has now been permanently blurred via time and celluloid. Now for the bad news: Sandler's 'plot' spends far too much time on the loving couple having to sneak around since Gable was already married, and their meetings with Louis B. Mayer (Allen Garfield, playing Father Confessor) are pointless. In actuality, Clark and Carole brazenly showed up everywhere together, and the public ate it up. Sticking to the truth in this instance might've served Sandler better than the silly melodrama on display, which mitigates the screwball humor Furie stages at the beginning. This picture is a real mess from a narrative standpoint, and the acting isn't dynamic enough to hold interest. There's a terrible, shapeless sequence wherein Lombard barges into a Women's Press decency meeting yelling, "Cock-a-doodle-do!" and a limp bit in the courtroom with Carole getting blue on the stand (much to everyone's delight). Brolin has Gable's squint, mouth movements and vocal inflection down pat, yet his King is made to be so downtrodden that it comes as a surprise when Lombard expresses rapture over his bedroom prowess (again, in reality, the comedienne once famously confessed she adored 'Pa' but that their sex life was lacking). Had Sandler gone full-throttle with a high-comedy approach, the movie may have been a hoot. However, the phony dramatics overshadow everything in the end--and since the film is useless as a biography, a good portion of "Gable and Lombard" is utterly without purpose. ** from ****

Might not be the best movie, but most of the incidents in this film really took place (read the book by Warren G. Harris)! Some of the character's are fictionalized, but the story about the romance is not. James Brolin IS Clark Gable. Brolin has Gable's personality and mannerisms down to a "T" and plays Gable with dignity and grace(unlike Edward Winter did in Moviola:The Scarlett O'Hara War. Winter played him as down home, backwoods, stupid hick, which Gable was FAR from!) I don't know if Brolin did any research for his role but he's sure got Gable down pat!! Jill Clayburgh, on the other hand, overplays her role a bit, but maybe that was the way Lombard really was! All in all, Gable and Lombard is an excellent movie for film buffs, fans of Gable and/or Lombard, or suckers for old fashioned romances. Unfortunately, the only way to see this film is on cable in a heavily edited TV version. Put it out on DVD!!