The Call of the Wild is a 1972 family adventure film directed by Ken Annakin and starring Charlton Heston, Michèle Mercier, Raimund Harmstorf, George Eastman, and Maria Rohm. It was written by Peter Yeldham, Peter Welbeck and Wyn Wells based on Jack London's 1903 novel The Call of the Wild, the film follows the adventures of Buck, a dog that is brought north to Canada to be used as a sled dog.
John Thornton, a prospector in the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, is trying to eke out a living in the harsh conditions of the bitterly cold Yukon region of Canada, with Buck the German Shepherd dog he befriends. Thornton struggles against unscrupulous rivals and natural hazards in the extreme conditions and is greatly helped by Buck who has his own story to tell: he was abducted from a family home and taken north to become a working sled dog. Man and dog forge a true bond of friendship, working together to survive life in the treacherous frozen North. Thornton is killed by Yeehat Indians, but Buck kills the men to avenge him. At the end of the film, Buck comes to the White River to mourn the place where Thornton died.
The film was shot on location in Finland, Norway, and Spain.
Tom Milne wrote in The Monthly Film Bulletin : "Scrappy and sentimentalised adaptation of Jack London's splendid story, rather more faithful to the original than Wellman's 1935 version but without any of the latter's redeeming features. Both Wellman and Kuleshov in Dura Lex extracted a weird expressionistic intensity from London's narrative style, but here he is reduced to a Boys' Own Paper hack mooning on about the love of a dog for a man. The Norwegian locations stand in quite attractively for Alaska, but the call of the wild â Buck prancing through autumnal woods and fondly eyeing his half-wolf offspring â has about as much primitive pull as an invitation to walkies. "
Charlton Heston in his autobiography In the Arena: An Autobiography made it very clear how unhappy he was with this film and asked people to not watch it.
Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors: A Wallflower Critical Guide described it as a "swinging back to action-adventure", starring "Charlton Heston at his best", another in the "long line of Annakin's panoramic films featuring a myriad of beautiful locations".
In Italy the film was a surprise success: it spawned a trend of Northern adventure films during the 1970s, including White Fang (1973).