Call of the Ford
Tuesday, July 17, 2018 at 2:50PM by Jason Adams
When Clark Gable played the gold prospector character called Jack Thornton in the 1935 movie version of Jack London's dog adventure novel Call of the Wild he was 34 years old. When Charlton Heston played the character in the 1972 film, he was 49 years old. And now comes word that we've got 76 year old Harrison Ford tackling the role... so given the way this casting's going look out for the skeleton of Clark Gable to reprise the role about thirty years from now.
Ageist jokes aside Harrison's a good match for the role, which is slyly stoic and adventurous in the way he likes to be but maybe adaptable to fewer big outward heroics than Indiana Jones, who's coincidentally why he's doing this role - the fifth Indy movie got moved back for a rewrite and so he signed on to make Call of the Wild with director Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon) and the hella booked screenwriter Michael Green (Logan and Blade Runner 2049 among many) and here we are. Any Call of the Wild fans out there?
Reader Comments (5)
Tom Hardy is 40 and famously in love with dogs. I'm just saying.
The first one with Gable and Loretta Young is a pretty solid adventure though the story isn't a favorite of mine. This is the film where the affair between the two that result in secret child Judy Lewis commenced.
There were at least to made-for-TV versions, with Rutger Hauer and Ricky Schoeder. I don't know how they accounted for it, but Ricky was 22 when he played the same role!
Ford is Indiana Jones but they really need a younger actor
"Call of the Wild". Omg. And you thought "John Wick" was cruel.
I don't know how they're going to make this movie. The story is full of skin and bones starving dogs, dogs being beaten savagely, dog fights where the dogs die. The dog, Buck, has a series of owners, who are violent, abusive, ignorant.
When I was in elementary school, the teacher would read a couple of chapters of a novel aloud to us after lunch. The class loved "The Call of the Wild". I hated it. The dog undergoes such terrible suffering, over and over.
The class loved it so much that the whole book was read aloud three times. THREE TIMES. After the first time, the teacher let me read my own book instead of listening, after I wouldn't stop saying no. And there's a sequel! "White Fang"! They loved that one too.