Money is Way Tight,

but I did get a DVD of the 1932 film, No Man of Her Own, starring Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. I was watching the film on my computer. I have seen it before (I had it on VHS), and while it wasn't any masterpiece, it was fun nonetheless to see the two great stars in their only film together. Of course there wasn't anything going on between them at the time; they were married to other people. Gable and Lombard's romance wouldn't start until 1936.

They had great chemistry together in this film. It is a shame they didn't appear together in any more films. Lombard played a small-town librarian while Gable played a big-time card shark/con man. He came to a small town from New York to take the heat off himself, but he ended up meeting and falling in love with Lombard. He tried to keep her in the dark on what he really did for a living when they both married and went back to New York, but she found out anyway. It all worked out in the end: Gable was going to reform, and Lombard was going to keep him.

In some of Lombard's early films, it's hard to tell it is even her until she starts talking. In this film, she was very recognizable. She was very petite and very pretty, and while there are some hints of her comedic talent for which she became legendary, she was more low-key here. It wasn't until the 1934's Twentieth Century, where she was paired with the great John Barrymore, did she come into her own.

This year marks the centennial of Lombard's birth. When she died in a plane crash near Vegas on January 16, 1942, Gable was shattered beyond words. He was never the same. He enlisted in the military for a couple of years, went back to making films, married a couple more times, and died just after filming ended on The Misfits in northern Nevada. When he died, he was interred next to Lombard at Forest Lawn (Glendale). What is interesting is his widow, Kay Spreckels Gable, carried out his wishes to be laid to rest next to Lombard, and Kay is interred in a crypt in the row just below Gable.

Not many widows would do that. It says a lot about what kind of person Kay was.