Jack London

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" (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.

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.

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.

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"!