TV REVIEW : ‘Sea Wolf’ Captures Spirit of the Novel

Movie makers have long been captivated by Jack London’s novel “The Sea Wolf,” and the version premiering with Charles Bronson and Christopher Reeve on TNT at 8 p.m. Sunday is a sturdy retelling of this dark, brutal 1904 tale of Darwinian survival at sea.

The production rivals the classic Edward G. Robinson remake (Warner Bros., 1942), generally cited as the strongest of all six prior “Sea Wolf” movies (including three silents).

Why do movie makers, in this case veteran writer-producer Andrew J. Fenady and director Michael Anderson (“Around the World in 80 Days”), keep making this story? It’s a great psychological action adventure story, that’s why, with a Nietzschean sea captain (the craggy Bronson as the megalomaniacal Capt. Wolf Larsen) engaged in a maniacal test of wills with a Nob Hill dandy-turned-survivor (Reeve).

In fact, Reeve’s effete literary critic with the moniker Humphrey Van Weyden (“Hump” to the disdainful captain), comes to represent a touch of Nietzschean Superman himself. In acting out London’s fascination with the idea of the civilized man who confronts barbarians--in this instance, tyrants and miscreants waging anarchy on a seal ship called the Ghost--Reeve’s nice guy must turn savage himself in order to survive.

It’s a favorite London theme first laid out in London’s popular novel “The Call of the Wild,” where the heroic dog Buck leaves a warm, comfortable home for the rugged woods and learns to snarl his way to the head of the pack. But the success of this latest “Sea Wolf” probably rests with the aptness of bringing Jack London and Charles Bronson together. They seem made for each other.

Bronson, playing what’s probably his first thinking man’s heavy, seems right at home as the power-maddened Wolf Larsen butting heads and spouting lines from Milton (“It’s better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven”). But it’s Reeve’s character, compelled to claw his way out of the galley as the spat-upon cabin boy, who does all the changing in this sea-tossed crucible of fire.

Shooting on a 120-foot, 70-year-old schooner on seas outside Vancouver, the movie catches the roll and pitch of the ship, the mutinous, homicidal sailors (Len Cariou, Marc Singer and the wonderfully sniveling Clive Revill among them) and is essentially faithful to the novel.

And in a doff of the cap to Hitchcock, writer-producer Fenady casts himself as the bartender seen aboard a doomed ferry boat in the show’s opening minutes.