The King and Four Queens (1956)

A Western that does not spend all its time in a ramshackle town or out in the open plains is the Western for me. Clark Gable is here in all his charismatic, womanizing glory here as the stranger looking to relieve four widows and their mother-in-law of ill-gotten fortunes. The double entrendres and manipulations of each individual woman is amusing to watch. All of the widows are great in their varied personalities and reflections on their marriages, as is their hard-as-nails mother-in-law. Eleanor Parker (whom I have to keep reminding myself was in more movies than The Sound of Music) is particularly wonderful as the widow who goes toe-to-toe with Clark. I had a lot of sympathy for Jo Ann Fleet’s mother-in-law, trying to hold together what little family she had left and holding out hope that one of her boys would return to her.