Jack London’s semi-autobiographical The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, was based on an arduous year the author spent in the Yukon, looking to find a cure for Gold Rush fever — a time when a man’s best friend was his sled dog. The novel was told from the point-of-view of Buck, a 140-pound St. Bernard–Scotch Collie mix, but with star Clark Gable on costly loan from Metro to Fox, there would be but one top dog commandeering the closeups. This, the first sound version of the oft-filmed adventure yarn, couldn’t be more dissimilar from its source if Buck walked on his hind legs and joined in the conversation. Gable stars as a prospector who takes his loss at the poker table with a smile, then partners with comic relief Jack Oakie, recently paroled for tampering with the U.S. Mail and in possession of a treasure map obtained by “jimmying” a letter. A romantic subplot was tacked on, and who better than the divine Loretta Young to play the “married” love interest and part-owner of the map? The studio had its hands full suppressing what was initially thought to be an off-screen romance between the two leads that resulted in Young’s pregnancy. (Her daughter-in-law later revealed that prior to her death, Young insisted that she’d been raped.) The worse the bad guy, the louder the hiss that greets him; audiences of the day must have sounded like a wheezing steam factory every time Reginald Owen’s Mr. Smith — the Coke bottle-bespectacled Brit willing to drop $1000 simply for the pleasure of giving the mutt a dirt blanket — hit the screen. It was the desire of rough-and-tumble director William “Wild Bill” Wellman to shoot entirely outside the studio, but Mother Nature had other plans. The surviving location work is spectacular, but not as stunning as the muddy boom town and the crowded watering hole that opens the picture. (1935) — Scott Marks