Scott Tracy Griffin covers the Tarzan movies in Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, but unlike the novels, he doesn’t talk about them one by one. Instead he separates them into eras: silent films, MGM, etc. That’s understandable, but I’d like to dig into them more deeply than that, so I’m going to include some Tarzan movie reviews in Tarzan 101 as a supplement to walking through Griffin’s book.
The first Tarzan film was the silent Tarzan of the Apes in 1918. It was apparently a two-hour film, but half
of the footage is lost. What’s left appears as a special feature on Al Bohl’s
documentary about the making of it:
Tarzan, Lord of the Louisiana Jungle.
It’s probably not fair to judge the film on half its footage, but that’s what
we got and there’s enough there to get a feel for what
the filmmaker’s were after.
It’s a pretty faithful adaptation. It opens in London with Lord
Greystoke’s appointment to stop the Arab slave trading in British Africa. I’m
cynical enough to suspect that the parts of that sentence that most trouble the
characters are “Arab” and “British,” not “slave trading,” but that’s not
explicit in the movie. We can pretend that the British were morally opposed to
slave trading in general if we want. What I like about the scene though is Lady
Greystoke’s insistence on going with her husband. The men don’t want to let her
and her reply is something like, “Can only men have courage?” She knows it’s
going to be dangerous and inconvenient, but she doesn’t care, because she’s
brave. Though that's right out of the novel, the film’s Lady Alice isn’t as weak as Burroughs’, who’s so fragile that
she goes insane after an animal attack.
As in Burroughs’ novel, there’s a mutiny on the ship to
Africa and the Greystokes are put on shore. In the film, their ally amongst the
mutineers is a man named Binns, who plays a much larger role than his
counterpart in the novel. Binns escapes the ship in order to continue looking
out for the Greystokes, but he’s captured by those Arab slave traders and
tortured for years. He comes in and out of the story at key times, eventually
teaching young Tarzan to read before going back to England to let Tarzan’s
relatives know that an heir of Greystoke is still alive. It’s a major change
from the novel – and an unnecessary one, I think – but I can see why the
screenwriters wanted to help explain some of the more incredible and
coincidental parts of Burroughs’ plot.
The Greystokes’ life in the jungle is an accurate, though
abbreviated version of what’s in the novel, as is Tarzan’s early life among the
apes. Young Tarzan is played by 11-year-old Gordon Griffith, who does an
amazing job of communicating the various emotions Tarzan goes through as a boy:
mischievous playfulness with the apes, careless curiosity in his parents’
cabin, concern over how different he looks from the apes, and joy at finally
figuring out why that is. He’s a fine actor and a great Boyhood Tarzan. It’s no
wonder that he was asked back to play young versions of Tarzan and Korak in a
few other films following this one.
Adult Tarzan is played by Elmo Lincoln, an enormous actor
with an unfortunate wig and headband. At first look, Lincoln appears to be a
bad actor, hamming up his performance with over-exuberant gestures and
chest-thumping like a professional wrestler. Some of that’s to be expected in
silent acting, but Lincoln goes overboard. After a while though, I realized
what he was doing.
His performance started to remind me of Griffith’s as Young
Tarzan and I figured out that Lincoln was playing his character as a child in
the body of a grown man. Instead of crazy, his gestures are meant to make him
look innocent and uninhibited. That reading is supported by the way he acts
when he meets Jane. The literary Tarzan is curious and attracted to Jane, but
he’s also noble and polite. Lincoln’s Tarzan woos Jane like a kid on a
playground. He’s shy and uncomfortable and inappropriate around her, and she has
to teach him how to behave around women.
It’s not my Tarzan,
but it’s as valid a choice I guess as Johnny Weissmuller’s monosyllabic grunts.
But where Weissmuller’s version still manages to hold onto Tarzan’s dignity,
Lincoln’s doesn’t. The juxtaposition of how childish he’s acting with how large
he is makes him look uncomfortable and silly.
Even the two-hour version of the film only covers the first
half of the novel it’s named after. The movie ends weirdly, with Jane’s party
out in the jungle looking for her when Tarzan – who’s rescued her from
cannibals – returns her to the cabin. As I said before, the romance between the
two of them has been awkward up to that point, so the audience is supposed to
be uncertain about Jane’s feelings for Tarzan. He hasn’t completely repulsed
her, but she also hasn’t warmed up to him as obviously as she does in the book.
The film ends with her calling out to him as he’s about to return to the jungle
and then they run into each other’s arms. If the movie had just been about the
romance, that would be a fine ending, but there’s a lot more going on and plot
threads are dangling all over the place. It feels very unfinished.
The plan of course was to complete the story in the sequel.
It was a shady thing to do since National Film Corporation had only bought the
rights to the one book and were milking two movies out of it, but the scheme
worked and they made Romance of Tarzan out
of the second half. Unfortunately, that movie is lost.
There was some drama around the release of Romance because it caused problems with the adaptation of
Burroughs’ second novel that he was trying to get going. That movie is also
lost, so since I won’t be reviewing it, I think I’ll wait and cover it when we
get to that section of Griffin’s Centennial Celebration.
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