The Call of the Wild

I'm sorry

... [clears throat] I had to read We had to read, like, a little bit of The Call of the Wild, you know?

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

The Call of the Wild with Harrison Ford and a dog surviving in nature.

And then I put Eight Below, Paul Walker and a dog surviving in nature.

These dogs are really working for it.

Obviously very tame ones at the time, like Do You Want to Remain a Virgin Forever? And he would stick with generic sex comedies for a good few years, with the odd curio.

He was one of the writers of the 1972 version of Treasure Island, co-directed by John Hough, the adventure movie Call of the Wild, and was assistant director on Bruno Corbucci's Isabella, Duchess of the Devils, which is a fun swashbuckler.

But he mostly made sex movies, and while his films from the first half of the 1970s are all rather anonymous, he found his groove in the post-Emmanuelle world with Vanessa in 1977, one of many copycat productions.

I mean, the oddest thing about Vanessa, I suppose, is that it didn't a- pass itself off as being another Emmanuelle film, as so many others did at the time.

Where did he get his hot artistic passion, his delicate feeling for form and color, his extraordinary skill with words? The man in truth was an instinctive artist of a high order, and if ignorance often corrupted his art, it only made the fact of his inborn mastery the more remarkable.

No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in The Call of the Wild, or in parts of John Barleycorn, or in such short stories as The Sea Farmer and Samuel.

Here indeed are all the elements of sound fiction, clear thinking, a sense of character, the dramatic instinct, and above all, the adept putting together of words, words charming and slyly significant, words arranged in a French phrase for the respiration and the ear.

You will never convince me that this aesthetic sensitiveness, so rare, so precious, so distinctively aristocratic, burst into a biogenetic flower on a San Francisco sandlot.

When he would create beautiful books, he had to throw it overboard as Wagner threw overboard democracy, the superman, and free thought.

A sort of temporary Christian created Parsifal.

A sort of temporary aristocrat created The Call of the Wild.

Also, in another way, London's early absorption of social and economic nostrums damaged him as an artist.

accident that's really good

that's a very good film yeah um so maybe watch those instead of this uh and of course there was one dog film i didn't mention in my pre pre-ramble uh which was the call of the wild that harrison ford film which is awful

No.

It's terrible when they decide to tell the story from the dog's point of view.

Very strange.

I mean, it's like, you know, it's an adaptation of Call of the Wild of those books.

You know, there's kind of like, you know, 1940s, 1930s books.

Yeah.