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.
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.