Must See Movie...

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a dog and I don't mean "White Fang". What could have been a low budget, puckish travel adventure is hijacked and turned into a strange yellow peril piece. After enduring an hour of unadventurous travelling and business details about journalist London (we don't get much of him as a novelist other than an opening montage of a shelfful of books) we are introduced to a little costume piece about his travails in Japan, and internment under what seems to be a pseudo concentration camp for Russian soldiers. We are informed that what makes London such a patriot is the apparent revelation by a Japanese host that Japan has a master plan of conquest because they do not have an empire and cannot survive on trade.Truth told, especially during the depicted Russo-Japanese War, is that all the great powers had the same attitude. And London probably owes his survival to Teddy Roosevelt's negotiation of the peace (only TR's anger over London is shown).London was also a white supremacist and anti semite,whose obsession with adventure sounds like misanthropy. If analogized to his similar contemporary Rudyard Kipling, we might have seen the characterization of a dashing poet, ironist, and visionary of human nature, and not a Bowery Boy. Some poetry does seem evident in the script at the very end.O'Shea struggles mightily as the lead, but he is no Spencer Tracy and has none of the Irish charm or humorous physicality. And how about Hayward as his beau? 'Oh yes! I already know you are going to leave me for nine months to cover the war because I love you that much!' After scripts like that, you'd be known as the foulest mouth in Hollywood too, and get the inclination to tear the eyes out of every studio exec you meet.

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.

In his brief 40 years on Earth, author Jack London managed to cram as much adventure and incident as would seem possible. This 90-minute film, purportedly a biography of the man's life but patently fictionalized, doesn't even scratch the surface, and remains a story very ripe for a modern-day retelling. Here, Michael O'Shea, in one of his first roles, portrays London, and his performance is both rugged and sympathetic. He is not the problem here. Nor is a young and very beautiful Susan Hayward, playing his future wife, Charmian, whose biography on London is the "basis" for this film. London's life has here been broken down into a series of episodes, which the film skips lightly through. So we have brief incidents with London as an oyster pirate, a sealer in the Bering Sea, a gold prospector in the Yukon and a correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War...colorful events, for sure, but hardly given anything like in-depth treatment. And Alfred Santell's direction (he also directed one of Susan's first films, "Our Leading Citizen," in 1939) is lackadaisical at best. Making things rougher here is a very poor-quality DVD, with a crummy-looking print source and hissy sound. Perhaps the best thing about this movie rental, for me, was one of the DVD's extras: a catalog of all the Alpha Video films, featuring hundreds and hundreds of full-color movie posters. Let's just hope that these films are in better shape than "Jack London"!

"Jack London" (1943) is a film that tells some of the life of author and news correspondent, Jack London(1876-1916). His work; fish cannery, fishing boat. Jack's adventures; Alaska gold rush, educational advances, etc. are somewhat documented, but not as well as I would have liked. The script dwells on the Japanese treatment of Jack London and Russian prisoners prior to WWI. There's true information on London there, but it could be more accurate. Much of it is weak and doesn't include his political stands.Since this movie was scripted and filmed in 1943 (mid-WWII), we need to know it was a quickly made WWII film that showed what was going on during a before WWI time. I saw it referred to as 'Japanese bashing' but we must remember we were at war and the Japanese were using their own forms of propaganda for 'America bashing'; remember their famous cartoons and 'Tokyo Rose'. Whether we agree or disagree it is in the past.And the director, Alfred Santell, and writers, Charmian London(book) and Isaac Don Levine(script) put together a movie that they hoped reflected the spirit of "Jack London".Michael O'Shea (born: 1906) did a great job of portraying the part of Jack. He did 19 more movies and several TV roles passing away in 1973 of a heart attack.But a true visual treat was seeing Susan Hayward in the role of Charmian Kittredge London. She added beauty and a fiery loyalty to Michael's temperamental Jack.Susan (born: 1918) died in 1975 of brain cancer. Susan was a great actress and you can't help but wonder what she would have contributed to the movie world had she been able to continue on.