Peter Warne
The wisecracking reporter who taught America how to hitchhike — Clark Gable's pencil mustache in the role that won him an Oscar.
- Actor
- Clark Gable
- Film
- It Happened One Night
- Year
- 1934
- Medium
- Movie
- Style
- Pencil
- Fan Votes
- 0 legendary · 0 meh
Why Peter Warne's Mustache Matters
Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) is the template for every road-trip romantic comedy that followed. Clark Gable plays Peter Warne, an out-of-work newspaper reporter who stumbles onto runaway heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) on a night bus and decides her story is his ticket back to the front page.
Gable wears the thin pencil mustache that would define his look for the rest of the 1930s, and it gives Warne his edge — cocky, quick, and a little disreputable, the kind of man who hangs a blanket across a motel room and calls it the Walls of Jericho. It is the same lip he would wear five years later as Rhett Butler, but here it is lighter on its feet.
The film swept the five major Academy Awards — Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay — a feat not repeated until 1975. Gable's mustache accepted its statuette with grace.
- *It Happened One Night* (1934) was the first film to win all five major Academy Awards.
- Legend has it that undershirt sales dropped after Gable removed his shirt on screen to reveal he was not wearing one.
- Clark Gable (1901–1960) wore the same pencil mustache as Rhett Butler in *Gone with the Wind* (1939).
How to Grow the Pencil
Thin, sharp, and dangerous. The mustache of leading men, jazz cats, and people who own tuxedos.
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