Book review - Tarzan on Film

Scott Tracy Griffin’s follow-up to his successful coffee-table tome Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration (2012) is Tarzan on Film (2016), a 224 page (10"x13") generously illustrated, fact-packed appraisal of the 52 Tarzan movies and telefilms and seven TV series.

It begins with a foreword by Casper Van Dien, the twentieth actor to portray Tarzan, offering a few anecdotes from his filming of Tarzan and the Lost City. Throughout, there are many other fascinating insights and anecdotes concerning the actors, actresses and directors. The book is a feast for Tarzan fans and for anyone fascinated by the movie business.

The Tarzan franchise was the most profitable in history until the James Bond movies took off in the 1970s. The only other fictional character to have been a serious contender for the number of movie and TV adaptations is Sherlock Holmes.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan story was published in 1912 in magazine format and subsequently as a novel. Twenty-three novels followed. It was inevitable that this iconic character would find himself on the silver screen. In 1918 the silent movie appeared, Tarzan the Ape Man, starring Elmo Lincoln. As we know, Hollywood didn’t really buy into the complete ape-man, only aspects of him. Until relatively recently, he was presented as a grunting, monosyllabic strong yet simple man, while in the books he possessed a remarkable inherited intellect, teaching himself to read and speak several languages, including French, English, German, Arabic, Dutch and a host of African dialects.

The first talky Tarzan film was Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), starring former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller; he appeared in twelve Tarzan movies and is still fondly regarded by fans. The scripts required the ape-man to appear a noble savage capable of only speaking broken English. One exception was the Burroughs co-produced The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935), starring Herman Brix (also known as Bruce Bennett). The “me Tarzan, you Jane” characterization persisted until the late 1950s, when producer Sy Weintraub produced Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959) featuring Gordon Scott. It must have been strange for Scott to present an ‘educated’ ape-man having already starred in four ‘monosyllabic’ Tarzan films. The Weintraub productions portray a Tarzan that is closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs' original concept in the novels; subsequent outings have maintained that stance with Ron Ely et al.

There are interesting biographies of the actors and actresses who played Tarzan and Jane over the years, and others besides. Despite the scripts, the stories and actors brought in the audiences in their droves. Each actor added something to the myth. Take, for example, Jock Mahoney, ex-stunt-man and TV’s Range Rider, who was the oldest actor at 42 to accept the legendary loin-cloth. He was suggested to replace Weissmuller and Lex Barker but didn’t take the role until 1960, superseding Scott. ‘Mahoney added 20lbs of muscle to his 6’4 frame, expanding his chest to 50” atop a 31” waist, while maintaining his lean corded appearance at 215lbs.’ It was just as well that he was fit. While filming Tarzan’s Three Challenges (1963) he was required to swim in the Klong River in Thailand. The river was polluted with human waste and rubbish. He swallowed the water and suffered dysentery, dengue fever and pneumonia, his weight plunging to 175lbs, finishing the film quite gaunt. The show must go on, indeed: ‘Following the final sequence, the delirious Mahoney, who was fainting several times a day, was rushed back to the hotel where co-star Woody Strode put him in an ice bath and fed him antibiotics like candy.’ Strode said that anybody but Jock Mahoney would have died. He took two years to recover his health and went back to work (sans loin-cloth).

Also covered are the two 2016 movies The Legend of Tarzan and the animated Netflix series Tarzan and Jane.

Besides the many still photographs, there are numerous film posters; indeed, some of the older ones are frankly poorly illustrated, but of their time.

Even after almost a hundred years, the movie Tarzan is still a phenomenon and this book does the franchise justice. A collector’s item, to be sure.

Tarzan - centennial

It was just over a hundred years ago, October 1912, that Tarzan first appeared in print and since then he has become one of the most iconic fictional characters ever created. This large and quite weighty tome celebrates Tarzan in text, celluloid and comics, among other media, over that century.
            Perhaps it’s unnecessary, but I’ll briefly outline his story. John Clayton, Lord Greystoke and his young pregnant wife Alice were abandoned on the east coast of Africa in 1872 when the crew of the Fuwalda mutinied and set them ashore. They were left with two crates of belongings, a rifle and some ammunition. Bravely facing up to the terrors of a strange primitive land, Clayton built a small hut among the trees and there they retired to relative safety, frightened by the jungle noises. Alice gave birth to a boy, John. Nearby, huge apes congregated, issuing terrible grunts and growls: these creatures had their own language and called themselves mangani; they were more hominid than gorilla.
            Shortly after John’s birth, a great ape, Kerchak, attacked the couple and they barely escaped with their lives. However, a blow to the head permanently affected Alice: while she cared for her baby, she did not step outside the hut again. Some weeks later, she died while the infant slept. At about this time a female great ape, Kala, had lost her own infant, falling to its death from the emerald canopy of the rainforest. Hearing the wailing sound of John Clayton mourning the death of his wife, the apes approached the hut. Kerchak barged in and killed Clayton. But in that same instant Kala snatched up the baby from its makeshift crib, dropped her dead infant in John’s place, and rushed out with baby John clutched to her breast. Acting as John’s mother, Kala called him Whiteskin, ‘Tarzan’ in the mangani language.
            Little Tarzan survived by chance rather than his prowess, though his young mind quickly outstripped the mental capacity of his fellow apes. A child of nature, Tarzan discovered the world was not an Eden. It was harsh, filled with threat and danger from many sources. When he was about nineteen, he met Jane Porter and they eventually married and had many dangerous and bloody adventures.
            This book is lavishly illustrated throughout with colourful artwork and stills from the films. It’s a mine of information about the creation of all the books, with a brief storyline of the twenty-four novels. Hollywood never really did the ape-man justice – he wasn’t a monosyllabic tree-swinging hero; in fact, Tarzan became fluent in many languages, among them French, German and Russian.
Ron Ely, one of the many screen Tarzans, provides a Foreword in which he rightly states that he believes most of the films and TV productions misplaced the ape-man by putting him into contemporary society when the basic allure is the period he was created, the 1920s, an age when communication and travel were protracted and challenging; though the film Greystoke came close. It’s about time this great character was restored to his former glory, not as an adventurer in children’s fiction but as an exciting pulse-pounding adult hero, which was the original creation.

            Indeed, the books were considered inappropriate by the Soviet and Nazi regimes as Tarzan represented bold individualism, so the books were banned or burned. Burning didn’t have much effect, of course: over 100 million books by the author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, have been sold, in 37 languages, including Braille and Esperanto.
            Scott Tracy Griffin, a foremost expert on Edgar Rice Burroughs, has amassed a wealth of information about the ape man and his creator and provides insight into the creation of the novels.
            This is a book to enjoy and treasure, a slice of cultural history.