Film
Martin Eden
- Director
- Pietro Marcello
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 129 mins
Jack London sure is the filmmakers’ gift that keeps on giving – right up there with those endless screen iterations of Jane Austen novels. In the last couple of years alone, London has been pressed into service for the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and The Call of the Wild, in which Harrison Ford was upstaged by a CGI dog. Not bad going for a writer who died in 1916.
Italian director Pietro Marcello‘s sprawling adaptation of London’s 1909 novel about a prole with ideas above his station transposes the story to Naples and has received mixed reviews, but does at least give us the opportunity to break out that splendid term ‘bildungsroman’. Ever-intense Luca Marinelli plays the eponymous horny-handed sailor who falls for posh girl Elena (Jessica Cressy) and does the struggling artist thing in the hope of winning her heart.
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