The Call of the Wild (1975)
John Thornton, is a fearless man who's after more than gold; he wants to do what's right. Thornton works for the U.S. mail and is the only person daring and smart enough to figure out how to travel the deadly 600 miles from Skagway to Dawson, Alaska in the icy winter. His incredibly dog Buck is by his side and part of how he survives.
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It is a performances centric movie
i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.
One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
Because you don't see things through buck"s point of view much of the character development is missing. If you're looking for the best movie version though, this one would win
If you have read the book and are looking for that same story to unfold on the silver screen, keep looking. This is a very "60's" adaptation of a raw and emotionally powerful book. To say the acting is "wooden" is an understatement. Most of the "spaghetti westerns" had more believable characters than this movie.In the book you journey with Buck from his ranch in California to his ultimate return to the wild. In the movie, Buck is little more than a supporting character with the focus entirely on the human side of the story.I would suggest re-reading the book instead of watching this movie, you will get much more out of the experience. If you do watch the movie, set you expectations low and you won't be disappointed...too much.
I had watched this as a kid on Italian TV; like TREASURE ISLAND (1972), it was a holiday favorite and did, in fact, remember the death scene of the Charlton Heston character after all these years! I've only watched the 1935 Clark Gable film (just announced on DVD) once but this one, an international production as opposed to a studio product, results in being the inferior version. As such it's watchable but uninspired, and quite scrappily made; the location shooting, however, is a big plus - as is Carlo Rustichelli's score. Heston is commanding as ever, but the real stars of the picture are the dogs - which are featured in some pretty violent footage for a film based on a children's classic (by Jack London).The rest of the cast is nothing special (George Eastman's villain is especially ludicrous), though both Michele Mercier and Maria Rohm (in yet another film produced by her husband Harry Alan Towers, who also co-wrote under his customary alias Peter Welbeck) are certainly attractive; still, the latter's shrill performance here demonstrates once again that it took a Jess Franco to offer her some worthy, meaty roles (particularly VENUS IN FURS [1968] and EUGENIE...THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION [1969])!
All in all it felt like a made for TV flick. The greatest moment of the story and other movie versions, is the prospectors crossing the lake, however, here we hear a woman scream then see a close up of her going under. Big disappointment. The director should have played that up, but with the budget the movie could have done worse.The editing was jagged and tended to distract from the flow of the movie. Chuck Heston is good in it and even if you dont like him you should watch it just to see him willingly give up his firearm in one scene. It was an enjoyable adaptation and worth the $2.99 I paid for the DVD.