Sporting Blood is a key work in Clark Gable's 1931 leap to stardom, a film in which he plays a race-fixing underworld gambler who rediscovers his inner decency. It marks the first time Gable tops a cast list, although the future Hollywood King doesn't appear until midway in the film's story. Even more, it "proved [Gable] could carry a picture to profitability without a top female star" (John Eames, "The MGM Story"). John Larkin plays Uncle Ben, the devoted stable groom of Tommy Boy, a magnificent thoroughbred who triumphs over owners' mistreatment to gain a shot at the Kentucky Derby. In a historical sense, the movie is Gable's. But its powerful and soul-touching last scene rightly belongs to Uncle Ben and Tommy Boy.

Clark Gable went from supporting actor to star in the space of one year with SPORTING BLOOD, adapted from a novel by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan. Gable is top-billed as a gambling house proprietor named Rid Riddell. When the owner of a prize thoroughbred loses heavily in Riddell's establishment, he is forced to give up the horse to the gambler as security. Rid enters the horse in several honest races, then pulls the animal during a crucial race in order to collect big money on the losses; then he plans to dope up the horse to assure future wins. But when the horse loses, the gambler, deeply in debt to mobsters, transfers ownership to one of his female dealers (Madge Evans), and then drops out of the plotline. Clark Gable isn't really the lead in SPORTING BLOOD--actually he's something of a rat--but he's the one whom everybody in the audience remembers long after the final fadeout.