 |
| Ladies and gents, I give you... Tarzan? |
Starring Elmo Lincoln, Enid Markey, True Boardman, Kathleen Kirkham
Produced by National Film Corporation of America
Memory is a funny thing.
I spent many Saturdays during my childhood watching old Tarzan movies. I watched Johnny Weissmuller the most, but I know I saw others as well. I loved the adventures of Tarzan, Jane and Cheeta.
The thing is, I never started watching at the beginning. I turned on the 13-inch TV in the kitchen and there would be the familiar scenes, but I never knew which movie I was watching and usually I was just seeing a few scenes and turning it off before the end. The result? I have a strangely stitched together narrative of who Tarzan is. I've never taken the time to revisit, but I'm hoping to finally straighten my brain out through this marathon.
All that as introduction to Tarzan of the Apes, a film I am 99 percent sure I have never seen one second of.
The tale is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the stories. Lord and Lady Greystoke are sailing to Africa when mutineers on their ship strand them on the shores of a jungle. Lady Greystoke gives birth to a young boy, but dies shortly after. Lord Greystoke is then killed by Kerchak the ape and his mate Kala, having just lost a child, adopts the human baby as her own. Tarzan is raised as an apeman, and becomes a feared hunter in his tribe of primates. Eventually, an expedition from his home country arrives to search for Tarzan and our hero becomes smitten with the young Jane Porter.
The first half of this movie is great. The young Tarzan (portrayed by Gordon Griffith) has adventures with the other apes, discovers his parents' cabin and a knife (his signature weapon) and fights off a gorilla. Griffith's face is filled with curiosity and enthusiasm. You completely buy him as the young feral child.
The apes here are good as well. They are obviously people in suits, but the costumes are detailed and the age of the film helps sell the effect.
And then the older Tarzan (Elmo Lincoln) enters the picture. And the film goes off the rails.
I can suspend disbelief as well as the next guy. But Lincoln does not look like a Tarzan. He looks like an extra from National Lampoon's Animal House. When he gives his big, bug-eyed look at something, he looks like John Belushi. If it were just a matter of him not having the slim build modern audiences associate with the legend, I could get past it. But his acting is so over the top and so incongruent with Griffith's performance, it just does not make sense. This may have worked for audiences at the time, but it just took me out of the film.
Which is a shame because there is a lot to like here. My jumbled memories of the later Tarzan movies alaways strike me as clearly being filmed on a set. Here, the locations in Louisiana they chose to shoot this provide an very believable and lush backdrop for the story. And they populated that jungle with images of lions, apes, snakes and crocodiles which must have been fantastic to the audiences of the time.
And then this overacting frat brother lumbers into the frame and destroys the illusion. By the time he and Jane fall in love, Lincoln, with his eyes popping out of his head and a strange head band, looks completely deranged. I can't believe Jane would be doing anything but racing in the opposite direction as fast as possible.
Even excusing the casting, some of the action set pieces are nonsensical. At one point, Tarzan is chasing a native through the jungle who just killed his adoptive mother. The native is limping with an injured leg and the hero is leaping through the trees.Yet Tarzan cannot catch up. He only finds the native because he stopped to set up a poorly conceived trap. Tarzan can't catch a hobbled native? Really? Then, upon seeing the native lying in wait, Lincoln does this overacting pantomime to the camera to show that he sees him. Tarzan is a wild beast. His mom was just killed. But Lincoln thinks he would take a moment to milk the hilarity of the situation as opposed to charging in and ripping the killer's head off? Again, really?
Ultimately, this is half of a great movie. And half of a laughable one. It's disappointing. I was looking forward to this one.
Watched on YouTube
Photo from Hollywoodland
Random fact: There is a fight scene with a lion that happens too fast to really be worthy of note except to point out that the crew apparently filmed an old, drugged lion and then killed him off-screen so they could show Tarzan delivering the death blows to the animal. You know that line in the credits that says no animals were harmed during filming? You won't find that here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment