Tue 7 Sep 2010
Movie Review: TARZAN AND THE HUNTRESS (1947).
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Reviews[17] Comments
TARZAN AND THE HUNTRESS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. Johnny Weissmuller, Brenda Joyce, Johnny Sheffield, Patricia Morison, Barton MacLane, John Warburton, Charles Trowbridge. Based on characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Director: Kurt Neumann.
Based on the pages of TV Guide that I torn out and slipped inside the case, I taped this movie from a local station in September 1991, VHS of course. (I don’t know if DVDs were around then or not, but certainly not do-it-yourself recordable ones.) It’s been stored in the basement ever since, and it still plays fine.
Unfortunately the local station (WTXX in Waterbury) played this late at night and spiced it up every so often with colorful ads for adult services such as 1-900-HOTPINK. Those were the days, my friend.
Johnny Weissmuller made only one more Tarzan movie, Tarzan and the Mermaids, before he morphed into Jungle Jim, but Brenda Joyce (who followed Maureen O’Sullivan) appeared twice more as Jane, appearing in Tarzan’s Magic Fountain with Lex Barker before calling it quits on her movie-making career. And Johnny Sheffield, growing up before the viewers’ eyes, became Bomba, the Jungle Boy soon after this one, in 1949.
As “Boy,†though, he may have been getting taller and filling out more, but in Huntress he wasn’t smart enough to realize that trading two lion cubs to some hunters on safari for a flashlight was an altogether too bone-headed of a stunt for him to stay out of Tarzan’s doghouse for very long,
Of course the members of that same safari, picking up specimens for zoos in the US after the war, aren’t smart nor wise enough to realize that even though they’re not killing animals, crossing Tarzan’s wishes isn’t the smartest thing to do, especially on Tarzan’s home turf.
The “huntress†in this movie is Tanya Rawlins, played by Patricia Morison, a beautiful brunette who’s nominally in charge of the expedition, but she’s too petite to overrule villain Barton MacLane, who plays her guide. In doing his job far too enthusiastically, for example, he finds it necessary to bump off the local native leader who stands in their way.
The movie’s 72 minutes long, but it feels longer, even though there’s only about 30 minutes of actual plot to go with it – which probably goes a long way in explaining why it does feel as long as it does. There’s lots of stock animal footage, lots of neat shots of Tarzan swinging from vine to vine, one scene of synchronized swimming, and far too much monkey business. Way too much. I think Cheetah (the chimpanzee) has more screen time in this movie than any of the other actors.
September 7th, 2010 at 2:33 am
I think Johnny Weismuller was about my age when he did this one. All I can say is yikes.
September 7th, 2010 at 5:17 am
I’ve just finished the five Lex Barker Tarzan’s that followed the end of Johnny Weissmuller’s reign. Warner Archives had these and the later Tarzan’s on sale at 50% off if you bought the box sets.
I was surprised to learn that I can still enjoy these B-movies even with the stock footage. Barker makes an ok Tarzan and Weissmuller had to be replaced because of advancing age and waistline. I also had a problem with Cheetah having too much air time but I enjoyed the fact that Tarzan had a different Jane with every Lex Barker film! A real swinger not only on the vines but with the ladies also.
I noticed the natives often wore funny headgear. One chief wore a hilarious contraption that made him look like he was peering out of a toilet seat. The white villains were suitably mean and vicious with Raymond Burr taking honors as a whip yielding slaver in TARZAN AND THE SHE DEVIL(1953). How did he ever become an attorney?
September 7th, 2010 at 9:47 am
I think this may be the first Tarzan movie I ever saw. I must have found enough to like in it that I watched all the others. Over and over again, in fact, since one of the local TV stations ran three or four of them every weekend.
September 7th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
I never saw Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan when I was growing up, only as Jungle Jim. Lex Barker was “my” Tarzan. I also bought the Warner Archive box sets of movies he was in along with the later ones with Gordon Scott and Jock Mahoney, neither of whom do I remember in the role at all, or only barely. I haven’t started to watch any of them yet, but I will.
I don’t believe it can be overstated how big a role films like the Tarzan movies and the B-westerns had in our lives when we were growing up in the 50s. (I think I am speaking for both Walker and James here as well as myself.)
For better or worse, they helped make us what we are today. And for the better, I hope!
September 7th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
They used to have “Tarzan Theater” every Saturday on TV when I was a kid in the 1970s. I think the last Weismuller, Tarzan and the Mermaids, is supposed to be worse than this one It’s the one with all the singing and Weismuller looks like he needs to take a nice rest in a good armchair. But I have trouble remembering most of the Weismuller Tarzans after the New York Adventure.
September 7th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Referring to Steve’s post: the only Tarzan films I ever saw at the theater were the one with Bo Derek and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. What I recall about the Bo Derek one is that despite the presence of Bo in only white body paint, it was the most boring film I have ever seen. Greystoke was good, but it really felt more like a British period costume drama than a Tarzan film. It certainly wasn’t “fun.”
I remember all the Tarzans incarnations, though, because of 1970s television. Tarzan had hit a lull then (I think the last thing was the Ron Ely TV series or was it the Mike Henry films), but it still survived in TV reruns.
September 7th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Steve mentions the big roles that the Tarzan films played in our lives. Not only the films, but the books also. The Tarzan books were the first books that I read on my own for enjoyment at the age of nine. I used to wonder what books I would try and save if the house caught on fire. The answer was the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
September 7th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Here is one everyone is going to think I am crazy on, but Cheetah, the original Cheetah, is alive and well and in a home for old chimps. She gets a little story on television every year or so when her birthday rolls around. Actually it isn’t that rare for a chimp to live that long, but still shocks me everytime I hear it. How many Lassies have they gone through in the same period?
If you watch only a couple of later Tarzan films watch TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE and TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT with Gordon Scott. Both are splendid grown up action films with a couple of the best fight sequences ever filmed.
ADVENTURE features Anthony Quayle, Nial McGinnis, and Sean Connery (he was supposed to be the next Tarzan after Scott, but had agreed to do some spy film or other and lost the role to Jock Mahoney — I wonder what ever happened to him?) and is directed by John Guillerman. MAGNIFICENT has John Carradine and Jock Mahoney (as a father son African version of the James gang) and Betta St. John and Lionel Jeffries stranded Grand Hotel types in Tarzan’s way as he tries to take Mahoney to the police for trial after Jock kills one of his friends. The final fight at the waterfall is a doozy.
The two Jock Mahoney films are good but hurt by the fact Mahoney nearly died of dysentery filming them and looks it. Woody Strode is good as an ambitious Thai prince in TARZAN’S THREE CHALLENGES, and there are some great stunts, but Mahoney looks like death warmed over.
Of the Mike Henry films it is worth seeing TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD just to see Tarzan doing some James Bond schtick and bringing down a helicopter with a rope and a grenade. Nancy Kovacks is the girl in the film and David Opatashu a Bondian villain replete with Don Megowan’s evil henchman. Even the novelization of this is by Fritz Leiber. Not entirely successful, but how often do you get to see Tarzan kill a hitman with a giant Coke Cola bottle in a bull ring? His Tarzan also has a major costume failure in TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY — though it was more entertaining when Sharon Stone did it.
If you want to see Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan on film check out the serial THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN with Herman Brix (Bruce Bennett). Not only does Tarzan speak perfect English, you even see him in a dinner jacket. It’s cheaply done (produced by ERB himself based on the book TARZAN AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY aka RED STAR OF TARZAN but moved to South America), but worth watching if only for the scene where Brix breaks the ropes binding him by expanding his chest. It’s not a special effect, he actually did it, but then at that time he was fresh from his Olympic gold medals. He also played William Chester’s feral White Indian Kioga in HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS for Republic.
And if you get a chance see the silent TARZAN OF THE APES with Elmo Lincoln. It’s dated obviously, but watch for the scene where the lioness attacks Jane and her maid in the cabin where Tarzan was born. The lioness went mad during the filming, the trainer took off, and Lincoln actually killed the beast on film saving the lives of the actresses in the cabin and everyone on the set.
And for a bit of revenge check out the silent serial THE SON OF TARZAN where in the next to last chapter Korak the Killer is “rescued” by Tantor the elephant — the rescue killing him. The rest of the film was shot with a double — and now you know why Hollywood quit filming stories in sequence.
My first screen Tarzan was Scott, though I saw all the Weismuller and Barker on television. Of course we have only dented the surface of screen Tarzan’s but the less said of Denny Miller, Glenn Morris, and a few others the better (ERB’s son in law was so tender footed he played Tarzan in tennis shoes).
The best are Lincoln, Frank Merrill, Weismuller, Brix, Buster Crabbe, Lex Barker, Scott, Mahoney, Henry, Ron Ely,Christopher Lambert, and Joe Lara. You probably want to forget Casper Van Dein, though the film has its moments and is probably the closest to ERB ever made.
Awful as that Bo Derek film is, Miles O’Keefe is the closest you will ever see to Frank Frazetta or J. Allen St. John’s version of the ape man. Those scenes of he and the lion on the beach are the great Tarzan illustrator’s come to life.
Curt
Counting animation there have been five Tarzan television series since the 1970’s, the latest on the CW in the 2007 season. There have been two feature films (the Disney and the Casper Van Dien I mentioned) and Tarzan is even now headed for the big screen again.
September 7th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Walker
I second the praise of the books. I think I have read at least three copies of TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE to pieces, and probably as many RETURN OF TARZAN and a few others. And that doesn’t even count Philip Jose Farmer’s TARZAN ALIVE!, LORD TYGER, A FEAST UNKOWN, and LORD OF THE TREES.
I’d probably have saved my James Bond’s first though, but it would have been a tough call.
September 7th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
I think Herman Brix would have made an excellent film series Tarzan.
I think a lot of enjoyment of these films today is due to nostalgia, if you grew up with them. A bunch of them are pretty campy, objectively speaking. A couple of the later Scott Tarzans were grittier in style. I think they recognized they needed to break out of the fifties nuclear family Tarzan-Jane-Boy-Cheetah (lots of Cheetah!) formula.
The Mike Henry Tarzans never seemed like Tarzan films to me. You can definitely see the Bond influence when Henry shows up in the suit.
You’d think this is a character they would have really done something definitive with in the last twenty years, but I think the first two Weismuller films still remain the best.
September 7th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
I didn’t read most of the Tarzan books until they started coming out in paperback from Ace then Ballantine in the early 1960s.
I do remember SON OF TARZAN, which I found a copy of in hardcover back before I was in high school, and I must have read it half a dozen times. I also came across TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE as a British paperback which as David suggests, you could read over and over again until it falls apart.
But I don’t remember reading any of the other books, and by the time the 60s came along, I bought them, but I was beyond them (I thought) and only occasionally actually read one. New interests had come along, including the Ace line of SF Specials, which weren’t the New Wave, exactly, but they were new and exciting anyway.
Getting back to Tarzan, though, it was tha same with the Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney and Mike Henry movies. I knew they were making them, but I didn’t go see them. But now I’m spending $15 apiece to get them on DVD. Reliving my wasted young adulthood, I suppose.
One more thing, and not so incidentally. In case you’ve missed it, the current issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG (#158), which usually covers horror movies, has a long front cover article on Lex Barker’s Tarzan movies — and in great detail.
If you’ve read this far into the comments, it’s an issue not to be missed.
September 8th, 2010 at 12:26 am
Just because this is the ideal place to sneak this in, in TARZAN AND THE FOREIGN LEGION, Tarzan is in the RAF and part of an international crew that is shot down in the Malay jungle by the Japanese. Tarzan, as might be expected reverts to type, making a loin cloth of his parachute and finally killing a tiger with his knife to save his allies. As Tarzan beats his chest and utters the cry of the bull ape two of his allies are watching:
“John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, of course he’s Tarzan.” One exclaims.
To which a Brooklyn born soldier replies:
“Dat’s Johnny Weismuller?”
At the end of one of the novels Tarzan goes to Hollywood and tries out for the role of Tarzan — he doesn’t get it, ‘because he’s not the type.’
Curt
Keep in mind that for the last twenty years Disney did the major animated Tarzan and the follow up animated series, THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, so it isn’t as if the character was free for anyone to use.
But I do agree that TARZAN AND HIS MATE is the best of the films — and not just for that famous nude scene with Jane. Though I would extend to at least the first three Tarzan films since TARZAN ESCAPES is well worth seeing too.
Still, can’t believe that no one has mentioned the immortal remake of the first film, TARZAN OF THE APES (1958) with Denny Miller, Joanna Barnes, and Robert Douglas, a technicolor bomb that gave us a blonde Tarzan and made most of the other Tarzan films look like Masterpiece Theater.
Re nostalgia, I don’t think that’s the only reason they remain popular. Like the Lassie films or Andy Hardy, they are, at their best, simple entertainment that, despite the setting, offers stong values, excitement, and a paean to the nuclear family.
My own favorite moment in the films comes in TARZAN’S TRIUMPH the first of the Weismuller films after WW II had begun. At the point when Tarzan, pushed to the breaking point by the cruel Nazi’s occupying a ‘lost city,’ utters the phrase: “Now Tarzan make war!” the audience erupted in cheers.
Tarzan, then as now, is as much a part of the national psyche as Sherlock Holmes or Superman.
September 8th, 2010 at 12:37 am
I’d like to second Steve’s recommendation of VIDEO WATCHDOG. Issue #158 has a long article that covers all five of the Lex Barker Tarzans in detail. I reread the essay as I watched the movies. I have all the back issues and find the magazine to be a great resource for dvds not only of horror films but of all types of movie genres. With so many movies on dvd, we need a guide like VIDEO WATCHDOG to point out the new quality releases.
September 8th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
The novel where Tarzan goes to Hollywood is TARZAN AND THE LION MAN, surely the goofiest book in the series and one of my favorites. I bought a copy of it just the other day and think I’m going to reread it soon.
September 9th, 2010 at 6:03 am
I was drawn to TARZAN & THE LION MAN because of the cover, which is simply classic. As far as TARZAN/HUNTRESS goes, anything with Patricia Morison is worth seeing. She was a remarkable villainess in the Sherlock Holmes flick DRESSED TO KILL and a Paramount “B” PERSONS IN HIDING with J. Carroll Naish.
To my mind, Jock Mahoney was the best screen Tarzan and THREE CHALLENGES still one of the better films.
September 9th, 2010 at 9:34 am
Dan
Mahoney is good, and THREE CHALLENGES terrific, but he was so ill and so thin and it shows in a man wearing little but a loin cloth. His health never did fully recover according to his step daughter Sally Fields.
For my money the two best films are Scott’s GREATEST ADVENTURE and MAGNIFICENT. Brutal, handsomely shot, and with some fine actors like Anthony Quayle (great as a sadistic killer), John Carradine, Mahoney, Lionel Jeffries, Nial McGinnis, Earl Cameron, Betta St. John, and Sean Connery they are the Cadillac of the Tarzan series — and there is not a single funny chimp or animal in either of them.
The next to final shot of GREATEST ADVENTURE when Tarzan looks at his reflection in the pool of water having just killed Anthony Quayle in an epic battle is as close to the books as the screen ever came, and not a bad performance on Scott’s part.
The two Mahoney films are directed respectivly by John Guillerman and Robert Day who directed the two Scott films in the same order.
October 14th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Hi-My favorite of the Weissmuller series is Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946).
Johnny was in incredible shape for this entry and the gorgeous Brenda Joyce and sexy Acquanetta as Lea, the Leopard Queen are great to look at.
It’s a top notch adventure and Weissmuller’s physique is amazing. Too bad he couldn’t keep it up for the next two episodes.