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71 S C H A P T E R 9 Heeding the Call of the Wild When Loretta learned she would be costarring with Clark Cable in The Call of the Wild (1935) and working for the fourth time with William Wellman, she was elated. She was prepared to have a crush on her leading man, salving her Catholic conscience by limiting her crushes to fantasies more romantic than erotic. But that was before she went on location at Lake Chelan in Washington—although it would have been the same if she and Gable were in Nevada as originally scheduled. But a change of climate required a change of plan, and the state of Washington was a logical stand in for the Yukon at the turn of the twentieth century. Wellman was in his element with The Call of the Wild. The more masculine the milieu , the more legible the Wellman signature. From the opening scene— with men slugging it out in the mud, bars thronged with hard-drinking prospectors, and poker players at their tables too absorbed in their game to ogle the chorines who languidly went through their routines—there was no doubt that The Call of the Wild was a William Wellman film, the only one in which a dog upstaged the stars. Anyone who read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild never forgot Buck, the combination Saint Bernard and Scotch shepherd, as London describes him, from whose point of view the story is told. Buck is indisputably the main character. London’s empathetic prose makes the reader wince every time Buck is mistreated by his sadistic owner or forced to contend with emaciated sled dogs so crazed by the smell of food that they attack each other. His point of view informs the novella, making it impossible to think of any of the other characters as real people, but only as obstacles that Buck must overcome in his Darwinian struggle for survival. To the fiercely socialist London, Buck was “the dominant primordial beast,” relegated to the underclass in a world that exploits laborers, even depriving them of their identity. Buck does not even qualify as a wage slave, since H E E D I N G T H E C A L L O F T H E W I L D 72 he is not paid for his services. He is simply a beast of burden, serving the dominant class but giving it a run for its money. Docile, Buck is not. The film is so radically different that it is practically an original screenplay inspired by the novella. Virtually all of London’s characters have been eliminated except Buck. In the novella, he heeds the call of the wild and joins a wolf pack, becoming the head and protector of his brood, staking out his domain, which mortals enter at their peril. The only other character that made the transition from novella to film was John Thornton (Gable, called Jack in the film), who is killed in the original, a fate that would not be visited upon the star. A host of other characters were added, including a female costar (Loretta) and a male sidekick (Jack Oakie). If the film were made a decade later during the Lassie craze, a more faithful re-creation of the novella might have been possible. But screenwriter Gene Fowler heeded his own call of the wild (as did Gable and Loretta) and concentrated on the Gold Rush, and the extremes of rugged individualism and murderous greed that it generated. When “Shorty” Houlihan (Jack Oakie), one of many invented characters , learns about an unclaimed gold mine, he enlists the support of another adventurer, Jack Thornton. Guided only by a map that Shorty has sketched from memory, the two make their way into a world as awesomely beautiful as it is dangerous, not knowing that the real heirs to the mine, John Blake and his wife Claire (Loretta)—created as a plot complication, with Claire as the love interest—have also set out to claim it. A storm sends Blake in search of help, leaving his wife to contend with the elements, especially the wolves. When Thornton and Shorty find her, she insists on joining them, unaware of their own plans. Claire— and, for that matter, Loretta—was indifferent to Thornton/Gable at first, but few women could resist Gable’s penetrating eyes. When he looked at Loretta bundled in fur, it was as if he could see...

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