Jack London was the subject of the media even while he was in his mother's womb. Namely, his mother (a professor of music and spiritualist, who was convinced to channel the spirit of Chief Black Hawk) Flora Wellman attempted suicide after her partner astrologer William Cheney blackmailed her into having an abortion. An article about Flora's failed suicide attempt was published in the "San Francisco Chronicle" on June 4, 1875, the public was scandalized, and Flora recovered on January 12, 1876. gave birth John Griffith Cheney aka Jack, who took his last name after marrying war veteran John London.
The local librarian intuitively guided little Jack to read Kipling and Melville. Just as these two used the picturesque characters of animals from the rainforest (Balu, Bagira, Kaa) or the depths of the sea (Moby Dick), London will convey his most impressive stories to the readers precisely through the characters of dogs and wolves. Among his admirers was the leader of the socialist revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who the day before his death asked to be read London's story Love of Life, about the struggle for life of an exhausted man with an exhausted wolf.
He left school at fourteen due to poverty. In order to feed himself and his family because he is left without a stepfather, he steals oysters, hunts seals, works in a factory, a firehouse, bums, boxes... He becomes a war correspondent from Japan in 1904. A body harmoniously sculpted by hard work, he tries to be a painter's model, but fails. Žarko wants to do music, but he doesn't have the funds for that either. Like the American version of Maxim Gorky, it describes the life of people from the margins. When he is rejected because of verism, he tries to wrap the story in palp SF garb. He reads the Communist Manifesto and becomes enthusiastic about Marxist ideas. Through Darwin's theory of evolution, he tries to combine Nietzsche's philosophy of the superman with Marx's thesis that philosophers should not only contemplate the world but radically change it. In six months, publishers rejected his 44 stories. He started signing his letters with Yours for the revolution ready. He writes to a man whom he believes is his biological father, but the latter replies: I cannot possibly be your father since I am impotent. London then sets off in pursuit of his new identity and gold across the frozen Klondike and Yukon, from where he will return with only four dollars and full of priceless stories about men, dogs and wolves. Is man to man a wolf as Thomas Hobbes claims, or is man to man the greatest saint as Seneca claims, and what are all the possible combinations in between?
First, he writes the story Batard, about a dog that goes berserk and kills its master, and then a reverse variant about a dog that returns from the wild to help a man, Call of the Wild (Call of the Wild) in 1903. That book became an instant hit with both the audience and the critics, and Jack London overnight became the most famous and highest paid writer of his time. Numerous film adaptations of that book followed over the next 117 years. The first, with a St. Bernard raised from a young age for the role, was Nema, from 1923. Another black and white one from 1935 starred Clark Gable and Loretta Young. This version least followed London's story of the friendship between the dog Buck and the gold prospector John Thornton. Since the main character of the book, Thornton, eventually dies in an attack by Indians, this should not have happened to Gable, who portrays him, and we see him alive and well, making his way to the happy end. Charlton Heston, who portrayed this same character in 1972, in his craze for gold (the earnings of which leave a hot saloon entertainer) meets a tragic end at the hands of the redskins, who are eventually beheaded by Buck. Then in 1978 an animated parody of this novel What A Nightmare Charlie Brown was made with Snoopy dreaming of becoming a pack leader in the wild north like London Buck. And Japanese animators offered their own version, Howl Buck. The screen adaptation from 1997 with the recently deceased Rutger Hauer is the most faithful to the book model.
In the early nineties, after the Oscar-winning film Dances with Wolves, the attitude towards Indians becomes more favorable, and in the 1992 version with Mia Sara, one of them helps Thornton (here a spoiled emo teenager) to become a worthy prairie fighter (and even return the found gold to the river) before he is liquidated by the rival Jihata tribe.
In the latest version, now in theaters, with Harrison Ford as Thornton, the part about returning the gold to the river has been retained. What distinguishes it from the previous ones is the absence of the bet scene in which Thornton forces Buck to pull a heavy sled for $1000, as well as the Indians: Thornton is killed by a greedy, crazed gold prospector. Buck is digitized in this version. When journalists asked Harrison Ford about it, he replied that there was a man on the set instead of a dog and that at the beginning it was silly for him to poke around behind the scenes of a man and not a dog. The relationship between Thornton and Buck is noteworthy. Scenes in which Buck brings him a harmonica that he dropped on the way, or hides a bottle of alcohol for him so that he wouldn't drink it after his lost son.
At the Belgrade premiere of Call of the Wild, a black-haired girl from the audience danced excitedly to the country music of the closing credits, letting out the cry that Buck calls to his wolf. Jack London would surely be proud of how much she liked his world, made up out of sheer pain.
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