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From my favorite movies..

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

When making a historical biopic, it's important to keep the dramatics up. "Then this happened, then this happened, etc." gets pretty tedious after a while. Jack London is one of the more boring biopics to avoid.Michael O'Shea plays the title character, and while he seems to have had an eventful life, Ernest Pascal's screenplay managed to make his life look like a series of disjointed episodes. First he works in a factory, then he's falling in love with Virginia Mayo, then he's a sailor, then he's at war, then he's getting a college education, then he's writing, then he's falling in love with Susan Hayward. . . There's no linear connection to anything, and Jack London isn't really given enough character development to make the audience root for him and therefore overlook the bad screenplay. Unless your favorite book is Call of the Wild, I wouldn't recommend watching this movie. For an interesting historical biopic, try The Adventures of Mark Twain or The President's Lady instead.

This fanciful biography bears only a family resemblance to Jack London's life. (Maybe it should have been called "Jack Liverpool".) The writer and director have taken a remarkable man whose life went from the pits through triumph to tragedy and turned it into a moral tale that belongs in a comic book of the period.I was a fan of Jack London as a high school kid -- loved his short stories about adventure and adverse circumstances. Later I was able to view his work from a more mature and generous perspective. He wasn't a great writer but he put out some gripping stuff based on his own experiences. "The Sea Wolf," which is barely alluded to in the movie, is a fine work, at least until we get into that plummy romance. Anyone familiar with the San Francisco Bay area should read the opening, in which "Hump" takes a ferry from the city to Sausalito and is rammed in the fog by another ship. It's flawless description. The circumstances are so aptly rendered that it could happen the same way tomorrow.Okay. So here's Jack London up in the Yukon during the gold rush. That's the source of stories like "The Call of the Wild" and "To Build a Fire." And what do we get? Five minutes of Michael O'Shea in a small log cabin, alone except for a dog, looking out the window at the snow and having a conversation about his work with the dog, Buck, who gives a fine performance, by the way.The editing is terrible. It's not a flaw or a virtue that brings attention to itself very often. But I couldn't tell whether O'Shea was married to Susan Hayward, just visiting, or shacking up with her. London becomes an "oyster pirate." What is an oyster pirate? Another episode begins with talk of war breaking out and London receives an offer to go to Japan as a correspondent. WHAT war? Who is going to war with whom? Is it World War I? If so, why is London going to Tokyo? The words "Russo-Japanese War" (1905) are never mentioned.That war itself takes up about the last third of the movie and it's curiously rendered. The movie was released in 1943. The Japanese are all smiles, bows, torture, and treachery. They open the conflict by attacking the Russians at Port Arthur without warning "to get, how do you say in your country, the first punch?" London replies: "You mean a sucker punch." (Kids, that's a reference to the Japanese attack on the US bases at Pearl Harbor in 1941, that led to World War II. PS: We won.) The Japanese massacre pitiful Russian prisoners who are dying of thirst, and they explain to London exactly how they plan to go about conquering the world, including the US and Britain, when the time comes.In 1963, a big-budget movie called "55 Days at Peking" was released. It was about the Boxer Rebellion in China, which took place 5 years before the Russo-Japanese War. In "55 Days at Peking", the Japanese are our allies, the Russians are shifty, and the Chinese are enemies. Politics makes strange bedfellows.As London, Michael O'Shea is likable without being a particularly impressive actor. He has a fresh, open face that looks like the map of Ireland. His family were all Irish cops in Hartford. Virginia Mayo is his first girl friend. He goes through one or two more, just in case the audience has any doubt about his gender orientation, until he meets Charmiane, the love of his life, upon whose book this movie is based.I don't think I'll go on. In life, Jack London did begin his go-to-hell life as an oyster pirate -- robbing the bivalves at night from oyster beds belonging to someone else. He was a union man and socialist, an imprisoned vagrant, a sailor. He did go to the Yukon and did become a famous writer. He was one of the first to establish an artist's colony in Carmel, California, on Monterey Bay. Then he got into heroin and booze and retreated to a ranch in what is now wine country, where he died in 1916.

No need to repeat consensus points—the movie's clearly compromised by its clumsy propaganda segment. Also, it's a shame more time is not given to the rigors of the Yukon, the real basis of London's powerful prose. I wouldn't be surprised that budget constraints cramped this key phase of his life. Too bad, because London was an outdoor writer who wrote powerfully about the outdoors—something you don't get from the movie.One scene, I think, is worth noting. That's where Prof. Hilliard ridicules student London's uncompromising literary realism. Though the screenplay doesn't elaborate, there's a background assumption to Hilliard's point of view. Namely, that American literature is dominated by the standards of its gentile, well-to-do class with refined tastes and the leisure time to both read and write. Thus, London's raw depiction of life at the bottom comes across as offensive for a number of reasons. It's that impossible leap from the immiserated bottom to the refined top that London's trying to navigate. But more importantly, he's doing it without compromising the integrity of his work.Now, the screenplay softens this conflict by casting the kindly Davenport as the professor and having him pay tribute to London's "courage" as a budding writer. As a result, hostility to the upsurge of blue-collar writing that London represents is seriously underplayed. Perhaps that's not surprising. After all, WWII was a great national effort where class differences were submerged to the common interest. O'Shea and Hayward are fine in their roles. However, I agree that a more honest depiction of the great writer's life awaits production. Given the richness of the material, I wonder why that hasn't happened.

Jack London is one of my favourite writers and the life he lived was so large - his books seemed almost small in comparison. "Jack London" was based on the book "The Book of Jack London" by Charmian Kittredge, his second wife. She had a thirst for adventure almost as strong as Jack's, so she was not going to dwell too much on his younger days. His first wife is not mentioned in this movie, she was older than him, they had 2 children together and she really encouraged him to pursue his education and writing. But they were very mismatched and he eventually left her to pursue his own interests.The film begins with Jack's (Michael O'Shea, who looked rather like him) time as an oyster pirate (he was only a teenager when he became one in real life). His best friend, Scratch Nelson, (you can barely make out Regis Toomey) is killed by the Fish Patrol and that event causes Jack to sail out on a sealing schooner for the Bering Sea. The trip is long and harsh (again, in real life, Jack wrote the book "The Sea Wolf" based on some of the characters). After the voyage he enrols at the University of California where his tutor (Henry Davenport) sees greatness and courage in his rough stories. Jack then decides to go to the Yukon and while there he begins to write stories about the miners and the girls who live in the camps. While in pursuit of a gold strike he finds himself snowed in with a dog and writes the book that made him famous - "The Call of the Wild" (in real life Jack London believed Huskies made wonderful pets and helped make the breed popular.)He returned to America to great acclaim and his life became more meaningful when he met his soul mate Charmian Kittredge (Susan Hayward). She has already fallen in love with him through his books but is afraid she will be disappointed in him as a man. After that small scene, Hayward definitely takes a back seat to his adventures - not at all the way it was in reality. He is asked to cover the Boer War with a London newspaper - even though he has never done any reporting before (again, in real life Jack, who was very passionate about reporting, covered an assignment about poverty in London's East End).I agree, after the first hour the film quickly descended into a message of propaganda (according to this movie, even back in the early 1900s Japan wanted world domination). The real Jack London deserved much more than this - he did much more. He and Charmian had their own boat and they intended to sail around the world. He explored Tahiti and the Hawaiian Islands and he introduced surfing to California. He covered the San Francisco earthquake and was on one of the last boats out of the harbour. He also introduced organic farming. It is unfortunate that so much time in the film is given over to the Russian Japanese War of 1905 - there is hardly any mention given to his many books.Louise Beavers had an excellent part as Mammy Jenny, the only mother that Jack really knew. Her best scenes were early in the movie and she gave her part real feeling but by the end she just seemed to be in the background as a family retainer. Beautiful Virginia Mayo had a small but attention getting part as Maimie, the oyster pirate girl. Osa Massen was Freda, the dance hall girl he met in Alaska.