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| Snowy adventure blasts from this poster for Ken Annakin's The Call of the Wild |
QUICK REVIEW:
The Call of the Wild is a pretty entertaining and unusual adventure dog movie based on the classic Jack London novel about a gruff man and his sleigh dog Buck. With another guy and a bunch of dogs, among them the evil Spitz, they head North to Yukon with the mail and meet ladies and hoodlums etc. on their way. - A lot of stuff happens.
Call of the Wild curiously fell into public domain shortly after its release, and there are therefore many very shabby quality versions out, and I saw one of them. It is a shame, since this film is definitely worthy of a decent restoration. As far as my research goes, it has not been given this yet, which is a disgrace.
The film was shot in Finland and has many exciting highlights among them a sled-pulling contest, and Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur (1959)), here as the tough John Thornton, is a personal favorite of Film Excess. Again in Call of the Wild he is a man who basically hates all people: "You can all go to hell!", as he says himself. - Cool!
The Call of the Wild is directed by English director Ken Annakin (The Informers (1963)) as an English-French-West German-Italian-Spanish (!) co-production. Heston in his autobiography In the Arena wrote that he was very unhappy with the film and asked people not to see it. The film had a bad reception and wasn't released in the US until '75.
- But I'm telling you, it's actually pretty good!
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| Another cool, 70's poster for this languishing pearl, Ken Annakin's The Call of the Wild |
In lieu of a trailer here is a scene from the film. This has clearly been restored, so I am curious, if there is a restored version of the film out there somewhere
Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown
What do you think of The Call of the Wild?
Other Ken Annakin films that you can comment on?
Please let me know if a restored version of The Call of the Wild exists
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