Clark Gable, Carol Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, and Grant Mitchell are all excellent actors. There careers were thriving at this point. It may have been depression times, but this warm and witty comedy hardly notices.Maurine Watkins who wrote the play "Chicago" in 1927, contributed to the screenplay. I think we have her to thank for a sophisticated point of view towards morals and for Lombard's character being able to show desire and passion with truth and subtlety. Being a librarian in a small town (Glendale) and realizing that Gable is a big city slicker and ladies man trying to seduce her, she rightly rejects him. However, being bored out of her mind with a small town life in her small town, she decides to gamble on him for a chance to escape. She's a lot less puritanical than Marian the Librarian from "The Music Man." The movie has a Damon Runyon flavor to it. The crooks and cops are playing a gentlemanly game and give each other sporting chances. In this respect it reminds one of Little Miss Marker.Dorothy MacKaill's character plays an angry, criminal woman who also has a passion for Gable. She could also be a character from Wakkin's "Chicago."The film is a delight with many skillfully executed twists and turns that still surprises us.

Long before they were an off-screen couple, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable were paired on screen. Once, it turns out, and that pairing (which should have lead to others) is one of the greatest in film history. Gable plays a gambler who gets rid of a mistress (Dorothy Mackaill) and takes a trip out of New York to put some distance between them. Staying in a small town, Gable meets pretty librarian Carole Lombard, romances her and on a whim, marries her. He's already told Mackaill he's not the marrying kind, so when the newlywed couple get back to New York, there is lots of confusion among Gable's crowd who are shocked by his impetuous decision. Gable's involved in crooked gambling schemes, and the pressures of his new life force Gable to decide to take drastic measures to change. Mackaill pops back up to offer her replacement a piece of advice and spill some beans of her own.Before Clark Gable put on his mustache, he was quite a dashing looking young man, and in this film, he is even better than he was in many of his MGM films. It is ironic that away from his home studio, he lightened up a bit, the other time being his Oscar Winning performance in Columbia's "It Happened One Night". The truly likable Carole Lombard is beautiful without being a threat, a young lady filled with humor, charm and spunk, truly natural in her acting style and a heroine you genuinely route for. Many young actresses over the decades have tried to emulate her without success.Gable and Lombard show playful spunk in a scene in the small town library where Lombard works. Elizabeth Patterson is delightful as Lombard's imperious mother, with Grant Mitchell in fine support as Gable's associate. Mackail, once a pre-code star of shady lady dramas, gives her all to the seemingly hard character who can't help but be won over when she sees the truth about who Lombard really is. Real life couples don't often work together well on-screen (most of Taylor & Burton's films) but that is not the case here. Maybe that's the charm that couldn't be repeated in further pairings, so we're lucky we have the one.

The nineteen-thirties saw a lot of comedies made. And this was one of many comedies made during the height of the Depression.But, it wasn't the first time for Gable and Lombard to be in comedy, although it was the first and only time that the two were together in a movie (they got married, for real, in 1939).'Babe' Stewart (Clark Gable) is the boss of a gang of card snipes, working the short con on any suckers they can find – rich ones, that is. After a bungled session, he goes on the lam to upstate New York and stops at Glendale, where he meets the local librarian, Connie Randall (Carole Lombard). He's so impressed with her, he agrees to marry her -- on the toss of a coin, no less – and they return to New York where he spends the next few months trying to keep the secret of his wealth from Connie.Before things unravel for Babe, he decides to fake a trip to South America while he voluntarily gives himself up to the cop who's been trying to pin a rap on him for years – thereby getting the cops off his back once and for all, and hence able to settle down to genuine married life with Connie whom, he thinks, knows nothing of his criminal life and duplicity.How wrong can Babe be? See the movie and find out...I'm a Classic Hollywood fan, of all genres, so I was glad to finally catch this one on DVD. The print was pretty good, so the sound and picture quality were great. And, like many other movies of that era, the settings were very much like stage productions, as though you are sitting in a live theatre: actors crisscrossing in front of the camera, very few reverse angle shots, and none-too-tight framing of the main characters, especially when in a lovers' clinch.Philosophically, the story raises an interesting aspect about their marriage: at the end, just what is the basis for their bond? Is their love based on mutual love, or mutual lies?

Oh, that was fun! No screwball action here but a lovable little romantic comedy, starring a ridiculously young and baby-faced Clark Gable as card-sharp 'Babe' Stewart, and a pre-stardom Carole Lombard as Connie Randall, the girl he marries on the flip of a coin: "Heads we... do it, tails--" "Tails we get married", Connie puts in, in a cheerful pre-Code gamble of her virtue, and tails it is. Babe the lifelong gambler gracefully pays up, and the challenge is on: judging by the post-coital scene in the sleeper car, he hasn't got such a bad bargain... but how long can he keep his new wife in happy ignorance of the crooked nature of the card-parties she helps to host?The film's title bears no particular relation to its plot, and the plot itself takes a couple of abrupt and apparently arbitrary turns to attain each scheduled set-up; but any degree of implausibility can be forgiven for the sake of the resulting comic situations, in particular the library scenes, where Babe tries to get Connie into bed with him on their first meeting, the 'getting-up' scene where Connie innocently ensures her husband is up and dressed in time for the fictional day job he has invented, and the finale where he launches into a vivid description of his supposed voyage from South America... in blissful ignorance that the truth is already out! There are relatively few laugh-out-loud moments, but the film has a sweetness of tone rarely found in later screwball comedies, with equal emphasis on the humour and the romance; it's clearly fond of its characters, and there were few moments when I wasn't either grinning with affection or amusement on their behalf.Gable and Lombard may have gone on individually to greater things, but "No Man of Her Own" remains a thoroughly enjoyable piece of fluff, worth watching for more than just the one-off pairing of its stars. Forget all logic and likelihood, ignore the occasional unevenness, and just sit down and enjoy.