This is a dog and I don't mean "White Fang". What could have been a low budget, puckish travel adventure is hijacked and turned into a strange yellow peril piece. After enduring an hour of unadventurous travelling and business details about journalist London (we don't get much of him as a novelist other than an opening montage of a shelfful of books) we are introduced to a little costume piece about his travails in Japan, and internment under what seems to be a pseudo concentration camp for Russian soldiers. We are informed that what makes London such a patriot is the apparent revelation by a Japanese host that Japan has a master plan of conquest because they do not have an empire and cannot survive on trade.Truth told, especially during the depicted Russo-Japanese War, is that all the great powers had the same attitude. And London probably owes his survival to Teddy Roosevelt's negotiation of the peace (only TR's anger over London is shown).London was also a white supremacist and anti semite,whose obsession with adventure sounds like misanthropy. If analogized to his similar contemporary Rudyard Kipling, we might have seen the characterization of a dashing poet, ironist, and visionary of human nature, and not a Bowery Boy. Some poetry does seem evident in the script at the very end.O'Shea struggles mightily as the lead, but he is no Spencer Tracy and has none of the Irish charm or humorous physicality. And how about Hayward as his beau? 'Oh yes! I already know you are going to leave me for nine months to cover the war because I love you that much!' After scripts like that, you'd be known as the foulest mouth in Hollywood too, and get the inclination to tear the eyes out of every studio exec you meet.

Aside from the fact that the actor, Michael O'Shea, looked a lot like Jack London, there is nothing positive I can say about this monstrosity of a film. It purports to be a film about the life of London, but frankly it bears about as much similarity to his life as it does Foghorn Leghorn's or Lassie's! Plus, the real reason for this film is a thinly disguised anti-Japanese rant.As far as London's life goes, aside from a few sketchy details, most of his life is unrecognizable in the film. In real life, he was married twice, ran about with prostitutes and died quite young--none of which are even alluded to in the film! Instead, it mostly fictionalizes his life up until he became a war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War (shortly after the turn of the century). And, while London was really a correspondent at that time, the film is basically an anti-Japanese picture--taking the worst of London's experiences and adding a lot of 'we will one day rule the world' thrown in to boot. Now I DO understand why this was done--after all, the Japanese and US were fighting a war against each other in 1943. And, it was true that there were militaristic forces that felt exactly like the characters in the film--but the film was about 1903-1904--not 1943. And so, to make the Japanese look terrible, the film took many liberties. This is funny, as during the actual Russo-Japanese War, American sentiments were mostly pro-Japanese! The bottom line is that the film makers should have either made a real biography of London or they should have made an anti-Japanese propaganda film. Propaganda films have a positive place if done correctly and reasonably accurately (this IS possible and the US made many such films during the war). Because the film tries to be both, it does a terrible job of both--and completely sanitizes and obscures London's real life exploits (which WOULD make for a fascinating film) and comes off as preachy and fake. Bad propaganda and even worse history--even O'Shea's good acting and the presence of a young Susan Hayward could do nothing to overcome a crap script.By the way, if you'd like to see a Japanese movie about a real life person that is filled with anti-American propaganda due to it being made during WWII, try watching Akira Kurosawa's film from his Judo series--"Sanshiro Sugata Part Two". While the film was set during the 1800s, an evil American was randomly thrown into the film to get beaten up by the hero of the story and to bolster anti-American sentiments in the audience! It manages to be even more superficial than "Jack London" in this regard.

In his brief 40 years on Earth, author Jack London managed to cram as much adventure and incident as would seem possible. This 90-minute film, purportedly a biography of the man's life but patently fictionalized, doesn't even scratch the surface, and remains a story very ripe for a modern-day retelling. Here, Michael O'Shea, in one of his first roles, portrays London, and his performance is both rugged and sympathetic. He is not the problem here. Nor is a young and very beautiful Susan Hayward, playing his future wife, Charmian, whose biography on London is the "basis" for this film. London's life has here been broken down into a series of episodes, which the film skips lightly through. So we have brief incidents with London as an oyster pirate, a sealer in the Bering Sea, a gold prospector in the Yukon and a correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War...colorful events, for sure, but hardly given anything like in-depth treatment. And Alfred Santell's direction (he also directed one of Susan's first films, "Our Leading Citizen," in 1939) is lackadaisical at best. Making things rougher here is a very poor-quality DVD, with a crummy-looking print source and hissy sound. Perhaps the best thing about this movie rental, for me, was one of the DVD's extras: a catalog of all the Alpha Video films, featuring hundreds and hundreds of full-color movie posters. Let's just hope that these films are in better shape than "Jack London"!

For the first hour or so, this fictionalized biography of "Jack London" is not bad. Michael O'Shea brings some energy to the role, and in general it conveys some of the basic characteristics of its subject's life reasonably well. The last part of it was heavily tailored to the time in which it was filmed, and unfortunately it is now only of interest as an example of how badly a movie can become dated when it tries to do that.Most of the movie is a collection of distinct experiences in London's life, tied loosely together. It works all right, and it effectively conveys the irregular nature of his lifestyle, with some courageous acts being mixed in with his involvement in disreputable and even illegal activities. The low budget nature of the production occasionally keeps some of these sequences from being more effective, but it's not bad, though it would have benefited from giving Susan Hayward and some of the other supporting cast members a little more to do.In the last half hour or so, the story shifts its focus to a lengthy sequence that has London in Japan, reporting on the war between Japan and Russia in the early 20th century. The overt and sometimes forced condemnations of Japan make the sequence now look labored and a bit frantic, though in its time the message may have seemed to be appropriate.There was surely a middle ground that would have allowed for brief wartime message to be inserted without getting things completely off-track. Many movies of the first half of the 1940s, in fact, do just that, and are able to hold up perfectly well today even when there are a handful of scenes or quotes that were clearly intended to have wartime significance. Jack London was a fine writer and an interesting person, but this movie ends up taking the focus too far away from him and from his life.