Call of the Wild (1935)

Film: Call of the Wild (1935)

Stars: Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Jack Oakie, Reginald Owen, Frank Conroy

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Loretta Young: click here to learn more about Ms. Young (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about Loretta Young's Pre-Code era, which had a surprisingly excellent film called Midnight Mary at its center.  But the Hays Code was fully in effect by the mid-1930's, and may well have been the end of Loretta Young's career had it not been for some quick thinking from the publicity-minded actress.  In 1935, Young made Call of the Wild, a movie that was relatively uneventful in terms of its theatrical run-it starred two big names (Young & Clark Gable), but it won no Oscar nominations, wasn't a particularly big hit, and paled in comparison to Gable's other movie that year, the Best Picture-winning Mutiny on the Bounty.  But the film would become one of the biggest & most consequential of Young's life (if not necessarily her career), and would continue to be debated for decades to come due to the off-screen relationship between Gable & Young.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is based on the classic novel by Jack London, and is about Jack Thornton (Gable), a gold prospector who along with his pal Shorty (Oakie) go out looking for a hidden gold strike that only they and two other people know about.  We soon learn that half of the other team may be dead, but he's left his wife Claire Blake (Young) behind.  Initially Claire dislikes Jack, but hate turns to love, and she joins their expedition, looking for the gold with Jack, Shorty, and Jack's dog Buck (who is, if you've read the book, the real star of Call of the Wild).  Things turn sour when another group of men, when a bunch of other men try to steal the gold, letting it fall into a river as they drown fleeing from taking the fortune at gunpoint, and Jack has to let both Claire (whose husband has returned) and Buck (who cannot fight his instinct to go run with wolves) go before he can finally be free of the "call of the wild."

The movie is not good, but it's not bad either.  Young & Gable don't have great chemistry, and honestly this is the kind of Young I'm not a fan of onscreen.  Compared to Midnight Mary last week, where she played a woman of the world, here she's a haughty, prim-and-proper type that would become her bread-and-butter as an actress in the coming decades but she comes across as too matronly to be interesting onscreen.  Gable has far better chemistry with Buck the Dog, who genuinely steals all of his scenes and is adorable, but Buck isn't in enough scenes, and the villains feel too ridiculous to be true.  Not a winner.

The reason I picked this movie, though, is because of the weird chapters it had decades after the fact.  Young & Gable had some sort of relationship (more in a second) off-screen during the filming of this movie, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Judy.  Gable was married to Maria Langham at the time and Young was between marriages, so the scandal becoming public surely would've killed Young's career, likely Gable's as well.  As a result, Young kept the birth hidden, and for the first 18 months of Judy's life, she didn't spend time with her mother, until later Young "adopted" her.  Judy Lewis (last name from Tom Lewis whom Young would be married to for most of Judy's childhood) would spend much of the first couple of decades of her life thinking she was adopted until her husband finally told her the truth, and her mother confirmed it to her.  Decades after that (in the mid-1990's) Lewis published a book confirming the shocking scandal, which resulted in a riff with her mother than would last over three years.  Young would later confirm in her posthumous autobiography that Lewis was Gable's daughter from her time on this set.

That would seemingly have been the end of it, but it wasn't.  Shortly after Lewis's death, her sister-in-law Linda Lewis said that it was not, in fact, a romance between Young & Gable that resulted in Judy, but instead the result of Gable raping Loretta Young on the set.  Lewis claimed that Young had not consented, and had hidden this fact because she considered what she'd done to be "adultery" which to the devoutly Catholic Loretta was a mortal sin.  Young died two years after she purportedly told Linda Lewis about this, and Gable, Young, and Judy Lewis were all dead when Linda Lewis made this public in 2015.  For what it's worth, while Young does acknowledge that she had an affair with Gable on the set of Call of the Wild, she does not call it rape in her memoirs.  As a result, we'll never entirely know what really happened in one of the most scandalous Hollywood moments of the 1930's.