The Call of the Wild

After viewing William Wellman's 1935 adaptation of Jack London's The Call of the Wild, I took the occasion to read the story, which I had somehow gone all this time without reading. While the film is an excellent adventure, it's instructive to see how little relation it bears to the source material.

The film centers of Clark Gable as Jack Thornton, one of many men who went to the Yukon during the gold rush in the 1890s. He has gambled away the last of his winnings, but is approached by an old friend (Jack Oakie) who was jailed for reading people's mail. In one of those letters was the map to a large gold-strike, and he wants Gable to join up with him. They borrow some money and get outfitted.

While buying dogs for their sled-team, Gable sees a vicious St. Bernard, named Buck. It is too wild to use in a team, but after the dog attacks an English dandy (Reginald Owen), who wants to buy the dog only to kill it, Gable steps in and says it belongs to him. Eventually Gable and Buck reach an agreement, and the dog becomes his faithful companion.

As Gable and Oakie are headed to the mine, they come across a young woman (Loretta Young) surrounded by wolves. They rescue her, and discover that it is her husband, who has been missing for two days, that is the rightful owner of the mine. They tell her he is likely dead, and offer to cut her in on the deal if she will provide the missing information to find it. She reluctantly agrees, and of course she and Gable eventually fall in love.

At the end of the picture, Buck succumbs to the title condition, answering the howling wolves and siring some hybrid puppies, while Gable does a noble thing for Young.

The book bears little resemblance to the film, other than it is about a dog named Buck and he is owned at one point by a man named Thornton. London's story, of course, is told from Buck's point of view, beginning with his cushy life in the home of a California judge. He is stolen and sold several times, fighting with other dogs for supremacy, and he eventually leaves his master and joins a wolfpack. London's tone is almost elegiac, a reminder that nature eventually retakes its own.

The search for a goldmine, the romance with Young, the evil Englishman, are all creations of the screenplay. The only sequence that is in both is when Thornton bets that Buck can haul a thousand pound sled for a hundred yards.

So, if you are going to do a book report on The Call of the Wild, don't base it on the film, or you will get a bad grade and be embarrassed. The book doesn't take long to read anyway.