Every Version of The Call of the Wild

William Wellman's 1935 adaptation takes liberties London's estate reportedly hated, folding in a human romance and a gold-rush adventure plot that buries the novel's animal-psychology focus. None of that matters. Clark Gable is so relaxed and magnetic that the film holds up as pure Hollywood craft, and the location photography in the actual Yukon gives it a physical weight no later version has matched. It is the one to watch if you only watch one.

Toei Animation's The Call of the Wild: Howl Buck from 1981 is the version that gets closest to what London actually wrote. It follows the novel's plot without the romantic subplot filmmakers keep grafting on, it does not soften the violence of sled-dog servitude, and its ending, with John Thornton killed and Buck running free with the wolves, lands as genuinely affecting rather than merely picturesque. It circulates in English dub on VHS rips and is worth tracking down precisely because so few people know it exists.

The Harrison Ford 2020 theatrical release is a competent family film that cannot get past its central problem: Buck is fully computer-generated, a remarkably expressive CGI creation that nonetheless reads at every moment as animated. London's entire novel depends on the reader believing in Buck's physical reality and inner life. When you can see the rendering budget at work, that belief collapses. The film is not bad, but it is the version that most thoroughly misses the point.