Thu 14 Jan 2016
A Double Take Look at TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE (1959).
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Reviews[12] Comments
This is one for the books. This is Steve. Two days after my son Jonathan wrote up a review of this movie, I received an email from Dan Stumpf containing his comments on the same film. So here you are. Two reviews of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, totally independently of each other, two for the price of one. I’ll let Dan go first.
TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE. Paramount, 1959. Gordon Scott, Anthony Quayle, Sara Shane, Niall MacGinnis, Sean Connery, Al Mulock and Scilla Gabel. Written by Berne Giler and John Guillermin. Directed by John Guillermin.
Well maybe it is.
I recall vividly and pleasantly seeing this as a kid when it first came out, and realizing even then that it had almost everything anyone could want in a Tarzan picture: quicksand, alligators (or were they crocodiles?) spiders, fights, vine-swinging and the Tarzan yell, as stirring in its own way as the Lone Ranger theme music. The only serious omission was a guy in a gorilla suit, but producer Sy Weintraub was going for a more Adult approach (if you can call any Tarzan movie “adultâ€) and, perhaps wisely, decided to dispense with the gorilla-fighting.
The result is a tougher fantasy, less pre-adolescent and more … well, more adolescent if you will. Greatest even includes obvious lust from the bad guys for their boss’s sexy mistress and a discreet fade-out when Tarzan and the heroine embrace in the jungle. The action is considerably grittier here, with some memorably grisly death scenes, but the main distinction of Greatest is the time it takes with the bad guys.
Said nasties are played by a cast worth taking the time for. Anthony Quayle and Niall MacGinnis were both in Olivier’s Hamlet ten years earlier; Al Mulock is less well known perhaps, but I remember him fondly as the bad guy who gets the first close-up in The Good the Bad & the Ugly; and Sean Connery….
… well that makes for another interesting footnote: At one point in this movie Connery is cheerfully hunting down Tarzan in the jungle, and our hero is almost undone when a tarantula starts crawling up his leg. A few years later, Connery was promoted to Tarantula-Turf in Dr. No. Such are the vagaries of movie heroism.
Director John Guillermin (who did my favorite PI flick of the 1960s, PJ) handles all this with speed and economy, pausing just long enough for the moments of character development without slackening the pace, and gracing the action scenes with fast tracking shots and evocative angles. Best of all, he seems to have a real feel for the Tarzan ethos: a man of few words and much courage; a man basically civilized but given to savage cries of challenge and triumph. In short, the Lord of the Jungle, perfectly evoked in a colorful package.
If any action movie is deserving of critical reappraisal and a reintroduction to movie fans, it’s Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, a truly gripping feature from start to finish. Directed by John Guillermin, this grim and violent Tarzan film isn’t kids’ stuff. Filmed in glorious Eastman Color and on location in Africa, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure has far more in common with the gritty, taut Westerns of auteurs Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, than it does with the earlier black and white, filmed on set, Tarzan programmers.
Now I’ll be the first one to admit that muscleman Gordon Scott wasn’t the finest of actors and that his portrayal of a noticeably more loquacious Ape Man is certainly adequate and gets the job done, but is hardly ranked among the greatest acting moments in cinema.
But it works, for Scott’s Tarzan is effective as a brooding, strong silent type. With a bit more vocabulary and a hat and a gun belt, could have easily blended in quite nicely in a dusty Old West frontier town. He’s the type of man you could imagine getting caught up in a range war. There’s a lot less “man of the jungle†in this celluloid rendition of Tarzan than in those clunky, if not charming and innocent, RKO movies starring Lex Barker as the eponymous title character.
The plot is elegant in its simplicity. Our protagonist, sans Jane (who isn’t featured in the movie at all, let alone mentioned), takes to his canoe and sets out after a gang of criminals responsible for murder and the theft of explosives. The outlaw gang is living on a houseboat and heading upriver to an abandoned mine in the hopes of finding diamonds and striking it rich.
Helming this outfit of misfits and lowlifes is a dangerous sociopath named Slade (an exceptionally well cast Anthony Quayle). Among his henchmen are Dino, a former convict (Al Mulock); O’Bannion, a jovial trigger-happy scoundrel (a pre-James Bond Sean Connery); and Kruger, a serpentine Dutch diamond expert of dubious loyalty (Niall MacGinnis). Along for the ride – literally – is Toni, a sunbathing beauty (Italian actress Scilla Gabel).
Like all criminals, and particularly like those stuck together in cramped quarters, this group is prone to not only mischief, but also toward turning on one another. Some of the movies most memorable scenes involve the fall out of one or more of the criminal group betraying another member in ways both big and small.
As time goes on, Tarzan’s pursuit of the gang becomes less about these particular criminals and more about his need to enforce his own personal code of honor. He realizes that the outlaws need to be eradicated from his jungle home, for if they were to stay, they’d taint it with their presence.
In many ways, the movie is less an adventure yarn and more about Tarzan’s psychological quest to rid his home of these unwelcome intruders. Romance and levity play little part in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, a visually bright but emotionally dark film that seems to affirm Burke’s notion, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Suffice it to say, Tarzan chooses to not do nothing. And then some.
January 14th, 2016 at 12:40 am
The quicksand scene is something else. Unforgettable in fact
January 14th, 2016 at 12:53 pm
Amazingly, the producer couldn’t wait to give Scott the quicksand exit. Read once that Connery was offered the role, and in the next one, that film’s villain, Jock Mahoney was offered and accepted. Older and more leonine than Scott, Mahoney ended his last Tarzan film by contracting the local diseases, finishing the film while visibly wasting away on screen.
Would still give Scott the primo position.
January 14th, 2016 at 2:35 pm
I remember really liking this movie when I saw it in the theater. You guys make it sound like it’s still worth seeing.
January 14th, 2016 at 8:45 pm
Ungawah!
January 14th, 2016 at 8:49 pm
This is the most adult Tarzan film, in a lusty adolescent sweat mag sense, and it is splendidly played. I was impressed with Quayle’s physicality as most films don’t show that side of him.
Most don’t hold MAGNIGICENT quite as high as this, but it is close, and VALLEY OF GOLD has its moments owed to these two if only they had left out the jungle boy and Dink the chimp.
What this, MAGNIFICENT and VALLEY all do is add sex to the Tarzan mix for the first time since TARZAN AND HIS MATE and it helps.
This one is a good adventure film and not just a good Tarzan film and that is quite a claim for any series entry.
January 14th, 2016 at 9:13 pm
It has Gordon Scott with (almost) no clothes on. Who needs a review?
January 15th, 2016 at 2:34 am
David: Quayle was over 6 feet tall, and pretty solidly built, but it’s quite true that his film roles didn’t always use that physicality. However, in ICE COLD IN ALEX (about a year before this film) there is scene where his character has to support a collapsing truck on his back, and he does look as though he actually could! Even in the TV series STRANGE REPORT from the late 60s, where he was in his 50s, he doesn’t look like the sort of chap that you’d necessarily want to get into a fight with!
January 15th, 2016 at 10:11 am
I just watched this on the Warner Archive dvd and it has to be the best Tarzan movie I’ve seen. Five villains! And they all come to bad ends. I especially like the ending scene as Tarzan watches the girl sail away and he’s thinking should I join her? Then he smiles and heads back into the jungle where he will be safe with his animal friends.
January 15th, 2016 at 8:39 pm
Bradstreet,
I know Quayle was more solid than he may usually play, after all he was ex SOE, and I recall the scene in ICE COLD IN ALEX, but here he looks a good match for Scott in a fight — well, with that SOE training he could have taken him, showy muscle like Scott’s don’t make for all that much strength or agility.
I hate to say it, but the quicksand scene would be more impressive if a human could actually die in quicksand, but it simply isn’t that deep. At most it would come up to a chest, even most children of average height are safe.
It claims more animals than anything else because they founder and panic and starve to death or injure themselves trying to get out.
Now there are bogs in parts of the United Kingdom and other places deep enough to swallow a man, or a small horse, but quicksand as shown in film is pretty much an invention of film.
October 26th, 2016 at 12:12 am
#4:
This story is most likely apocryphal, but it sounds like it should be true:
Back in the ’30s-’40s, there weren’t many black members in the Screen Actors Guild.
When jungle movies were being made, mainly at Poverty Row studios, casting directors looking for black faces to play the natives drew from two pools: college football, basketball, and track stars, and jazz musicians who were between gigs.
Given the general indignity (and low pay) of these engagements, the musicians developed their own code when discussing the situation with each other.
Since many of the Hollywood jungle sets were at the soundstages of “Gower Gulch”, the musicians would refer to the movie gigs thusly: “Next week I’m gonna be on Gower.”
Since they knew that they’d get a little more money if they spoke on-camera (and since no one in Hollywood knew any Swahili), the musicians made up a doubletalk “language” incorporating many jazz expressions – and “On Gower” came out as “Ungawa!”
That’s the story, anyway – and it’s likely not so – but you gotta admit it sounds good …
October 26th, 2016 at 12:57 am
I do so admit!
October 26th, 2016 at 1:44 am
Either that or someone’s pulling both our legs.