La vie aventureuse de Jack London

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"!

Beginning and ending with the launching of the battleship Jack London. This is one of numerous films made by the combatant nations during the Second World War posthumously enlisting an eminent countryman of the past in support of the present war effort.

In this case it's author Jack London who in the second half of this highly romanticised biopic, after witnessing the Japanese denying water to prisoners and machine-gunning civilians is transformed into a two-fisted action hero grimly determined to spread the word about the need to stop the continued imperial ambitions of the Land of the Rising Sun.

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.

Freddy Rich's score is a lush, exciting, melodic treat for Jack London. Freddy was also known as Buddy Rich, a jazz artist. Here, though, he shows his versatility as a symphonic composer, and he was very talented in this realm. Listen to the music when he is working in the Yukon and is alone with his dog in the cabin. Very descriptive of the intense cold and his inspirations. The martial music for the Japanese march is also very impressive. There are other favorite parts for me--like when the police fight it out with the smugglers on the Oakland waterfront. This is a great score; it was nominated for an Academy Award. I think you might enjoy concentrating on the score the next time you view the film.

Aside from the fact that the actor, Michael O'Shea, looked a lot like Jack London, there is nothing positive I can say about this monstrosity of a film. It purports to be a film about the life of London, but frankly it bears about as much similarity to his life as it does Foghorn Leghorn's or Lassie's! Plus, the real reason for this film is a thinly disguised anti-Japanese rant.

As far as London's life goes, aside from a few sketchy details, most of his life is unrecognizable in the film. In real life, he was married twice, ran about with prostitutes and died quite young--none of which are even alluded to in the film! Instead, it mostly fictionalizes his life up until he became a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War (shortly after the turn of the century). And, while London was really a correspondent at that time, the film is basically an anti-Japanese picture--taking the worst of London's experiences and adding a lot of 'we will one day rule the world' thrown in to boot. Now I DO understand why this was done--after all, the Japanese and US were fighting a war against each other in 1943. And, it was true that there were militaristic forces that felt exactly like the characters in the film--but the film was about 1903-1904--not 1943. And so, to make the Japanese look terrible, the film took many liberties. This is funny, as during the actual Russo-Japanese War, American sentiments were mostly pro-Japanese! The bottom line is that the film makers should have either made a real biography of London or they should have made an anti-Japanese propaganda film. Propaganda films have a positive place if done correctly and reasonably accurately (this IS possible and the US made many such films during the war). Because the film tries to be both, it does a terrible job of both--and completely sanitizes and obscures London's real life exploits (which WOULD make for a fascinating film) and comes off as preachy and fake. Bad propaganda and even worse history--even O'Shea's good acting and the presence of a young Susan Hayward could do nothing to overcome a crap script.

By the way, if you'd like to see a Japanese movie about a real life person that is filled with anti-American propaganda due to it being made during WWII, try watching Akira Kurosawa's film from his Judo series--"Sanshiro Sugata Part Two". While the film was set during the 1800s, an evil American was randomly thrown into the film to get beaten up by the hero of the story and to bolster anti-American sentiments in the audience! It manages to be even more superficial than "Jack London" in this regard.