Clark Gable, Gone with the Wind

as RHETT BUTLER

There's a moment in Babes in Arms where Mickey Rooney, trying to put on a show, attempts to coach a peer into playing "...a Clark Gable type, very modern and polished and full of suaveness," and when said peer doesn't do a very good job, Rooney instructs him to be more "virile". It's an on-point description. Gable is the type of star who effortlessly oozes a rugged yet clean and sexy suaveness. It's ironic then that Rooney would face Gable in 1939's Oscar race, with Gable personifying these adjectives to full effect in his legendary turn as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. There is a part of me that feels that this performance is more legendary not due to quality acting but due to the iconography associated with Rhett's image and Gone with the Wind as a whole. However, I can't deny that Gable owns the part and does the absolute best he possibly can with it.

Clark Gable, Mutiny on the Bounty

as FLETCHER CHRISTIAN

The toughest thing about watching a film with multiple acting nominees is that I have terrible difficulty focusing wholly on one performance. I could be watching and absorbing in Actor 1, and once Actor 2 comes into the scene, my train of thought is totally derailed as I try to juggle my analysis of both actors simultaneously. So imagine my difficulty with Mutiny on the Bounty, the first and probably the last film ever to boast three lead actor nominees. Each man's character is different from the other, and each man tackles his role in a different manner to varying levels of success. The performance I had the most trouble in forming an opinion on was Clark Gable's, whom I really enjoyed when I first sat through Mutiny on the Bounty, but whom I also became really disenchanted with after the second run-through, and ever since I've been trying to figure out why.

Clark Gable, It Happened One Night

as PETER WARNE

Won: Academy Award - Best Actor

Hop onto Google Images and type in "leading man" and the first three men to pop up (ignoring the several photos of Jon Bon Jovi who I guess starred in a picture called The Leading Man...the more you know) are Leo DiCaprio, Cary Grant, and Clark Gable. I've always thought that Gable was as definitively a leading man as you could get--aside from his classic good looks, there is an air of arrogance in the smirks you see him giving in all those old Hollywood photographs of his, and reports such as his not wanting to do a crying scene as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind or his alleged unhappiness over Spencer Tracy upstaging him in San Francisco only solidifies this perception of Gable as your typical man's man. I had my qualms about Gable here as I thought it would be another William Powell situation, wherein the leading man ideal is epitomized perfectly but the performance as a whole lacks depth...