‘The Call of the Wild’ Starring Charlton Heston is Terrible, But At Least the Dogs Are Real

The 1972 version of The Call of the Wild starring Charlton Heston is, by all accounts, a very bad movie. But it does have one very important thing going for it: The dogs are real.

Despite the fact that moviegoers have been begging it to stop, Hollywood is committed to making live-action movies about animals, using CGI animals. Disney did it with The Lion King, and people (including me) complained that the animals were too realistic, and therefore lacked the emotional range of the beloved cartoon characters. Now, 20th Century Studios has done it with Jack London’s classic novel, The Call of the Wild, and, perhaps taking a note from The Lion King backlash, leaned into a cartoon version of CGI Buck. Unsurprisingly, people still aren’t happy.

Reviews have been mixed-to-good for the 2020 film starring Harrison Ford, but even critics who liked the film point to the human performances as the saving grace, and the animation as unnerving. Perhaps London’s turn-of-the-century survivalist tale wasn’t the place for cartoons, or, perhaps, on a more basic level, humans like to look at real dogs.

You could, for example, take Disney’s live-action Lady and the Tramp. That movie didn’t blow any minds, but the real and adorable leading dogs were enough to please a handful of critics. Or you could take the 1972 version of The Call of the Wild starring silver screen legend Charlton Heston, which I watched simply because it’s streaming free on both Amazon Prime and Tubi.

I would like to be clear: This movie is not good. I am certain the new Call of the Wild from director Chris Sanders is much, much better. Heston, who won the Oscar for his iconic performance in 1959’s Ben-Hur, hated the film. He called it “the worst film of my career,” and reportedly asked people not to watch it in his autobiography, In the Arena: An Autobiography. 

I don’t blame him. Though the movie—directed by Ken Annakin—is only 100 minutes, it’s hard to get through. The cinematography resembles a viral YouTube video from 2005, the story is incomprehensible despite it being based on a pretty famous story, and the sound is so bad, at times it seems like it’s been dubbed. There is, inexplicably, a scene where Charlton Heston is bathed in a barrel by a French pin-up model. The one cool scene in the movie, in which an unlucky musher rides into town frozen solid on his sled, is promptly ruined by one of the film’s many melodramatic zoom-ins.

And yet… this movie also has a lot of good doggos! It has real puppers who run around the screen, and they are adorable. Any time anything happens to any of the dogs, Annakin intercuts a reaction shot from four or five canines, as if they were A-list celebrities in the audience at the Oscars. It’s delightful, and I loved it every time.

Look at those fluffy good boys! Don’t you just want to hug them? Don’t you just want scoop them up in your arms and carry them, as Charlton Heston did to his definitely real, extremely cute, and decidedly not CGI co-star?

Compare the above good boy to the below behind-the-scenes look at Harrison Ford acting with Terry Notary—the man who played CGI Buck by wearing a special suit and walking on all fours—from CBS Sunday Morning.

Harrison Ford has the range, of course, but it’s impossible to recreate the warm-and-fuzzy feeling I get seeing Charlton Heston with an armful of doggo from Harrison Ford carrying a human-man-turned-CGI-dog.

The one downside of these very real and very good boys in the 1972 Call of the Wild is that I have absolutely zero faith director Ken Annakin made sure that no dogs were harmed in the making of this movie. There are some disturbing moments of animal abuse in the film, so keep that in mind before you stream The Call of the Wild on Amazon Prime or Tubi. But I hope Hollywood takes a lesson from this: Real dogs are cute, and people like to look at them. Even when they’re in terrible movies.

Watch The Call of the Wild (1972)