Swing, Tarzan, Swing! Ch.4: Gordon Scott's 'Great Adventure'
Saturday, June 4, 2016 at 4:00PM 
As we approach the release of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) we're ogling past screen incarnations of the Lord of the Apes...
Though old franchises like Tarzan are sometimes less visually sophisticated within their eras than our current franchises (probably because the new ones are no longer cheaply produced "B" pictures but Hollywood's main attraction) in one significant way they're vastly superior: they assume the audience doesn't need a perpetual origin story and will remember who the character is from film to film.
Consider this: With Gordon Scott and Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959) we are three actors into the "official" series and twenty-one films into the franchise and they have not once felt the need to retell (or even really tell at all) Tarzan's origin story. After twenty-one films! Imagine it. Origin stories are a waste of time. You don't need to perpetually relive them, *COUGH Batman and Spider-Man*, because your audience already knows them by heart. [more...]
the first shot of Gordon Scott in the movie, waking from a nap
Either that or they can be inferred through performance or economic screenwriting. For instance, in practically every single Tarzan film someone (or multiple someones) has a line of dialogue just like this:
He told me about you, a man who lives with apes (!). I didn't believe him.'
...wherein someone says they thought he was a myth. And isn't that all we really need by way of introduction?
Some elements remain but other things have changed. The Tarzan films moved into color for good in 1958. In Greatest Adventure, the first of the series to shoot entirely in Africa, the character is even reinvented without the producers fearing that audiences would need an explanation or even a new face to buy it since this was Gordon Scott's fourth stab at the character. The ape man suddenly speaks perfect English (with no explanation for the shift, though it's closer to Edgar Rice Burrough's literary creation since it was the movies that stamped "Me Tarzan You Jane" onto his legend). The Scott films were also significant in that, but for one film, they entirely dumped the character of Jane.
But don't despair, romantic hopefuls, some relationships last a lifetime: Cheeta still lives with Tarzan.
Did you hear something, too, Cheeta?
But I shouldn't offer false hope. The bloom has even left that rose. Cheeta has NO chemistry with Gordon Scott, looks totally bored, and is abruptly told to stay at home at the beginning of the picture and she does.
The big novelty factor of Greatest Adventure, in retrospect, beyond the shooting in Africa thing, is that Sean Connery plays one of the main villains. Rumor has it that he was sought for the Tarzan role itself at some point (not sure for which film) but they were too late: he had already committed to play James Bond in Dr. No (1962), the role which would become his signature.
Anthony Quayle and Sean Connery are deadly killers
When we first "see" Sean Connery (the quotes are necessary), he's in black face. I shuddered. They aren't really going there in 1958, are they? As it turns out, they weren't. It's just that he's one of the bad guys and the black face is their evil (and racist) ploy so that their crimes will be blamed on Africans in the thick of the night as they rob a village and kill anyone who recognize them despite their disguises.
Naturally Tarzan is soon in hot pursuit to avenge his dead friend and murder Slade (Anthony Quayle) and his pack of quarrelling diamond-hunting villains.
Complicating Tarzan's pursuit is a pilot named Angie played by Sara Shane. She's just gorgeous, strutting into the picture like she'd rather be a Marylee Hadley than a Jane surrogate. She's on Tarzan's side though he's completely brusque with her -- he doesn't like her jaded quips -- but when her plane goes down, he saves her and he's stuck with her for the duration.
Naturally their bickering turns into something else and Tarzan FINALLY gets his flirt on after she nurses him back to health from a near fatal injury. Strangely the movie doesn't let us see them kiss, stopping with an image of him pulling her closer which is followed, a scene later when we return to them, by post-coital iciness.
Tarzan: Will you stay?
Angie: No.
Clearly this Tarzan is not the wild (inferred) wonder in the sack that Weismuller was, since this Jane-surrogate isn't blissfully relaxed like Maureen O'Sullivan always was.
we get two scenes of vine swinging which is more than Lex Barker gave us
The climax is terrific and nail-biting
Not that Scott's Tarzan doesn't have other talents. The action in this particular film in the series is quite good with Scott given ample opportunity to flex his muscles, dive, punch, climb, stab, shoot arrows, and even swing on vines a couple of times, fairly convincingly. He even checks how sturdy they are with a good yank rather than acting like they've already been prepped for a trapeze act.
I'm happy to report that even if it's not the "Greatest" it's still one of the very best Tarzan films. Greatest Adventure is continually engaging, peppered with actually tense action sequences (and surprisingly brutal deaths), and it offers up more "acting" than these movies usually do (apart from Scott himself) with deeper villain characterizations.
Anthony Quayle, later in his career an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning actor, is particularly good as the genuinely unsettling and patient villain. He even gets a juicy 'i'm actually a psychopath' style monologue in which he fantasizes about strangling Tarzan with wire.
The climactic battle with Tarzan is genuinely exciting and feels dangerous. With the end of the 1950s the Tarzan franchise is no longer selling a family-friendly suburban jungle hero with a wife but a dangerous loner in the kill-or-be-killed jungle. Tarzan's not an anti-hero all of a sudden, but neither is he soft and cuddly. Perhaps foreshadowing the more turbulent 60s no one trusts anyone in this picture and it ends on Tarzan's triumphant battle yell, rather than anything more comforting like going home to Cheeta or kissing the girl. A villain dashed on the rocks is about as "happy" as this vaguely paranoid and sometimes brutal picture is going to get.
SOME ADDITIONAL RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
• Isn't it strange how human DNA doesn't really change but body shapes, as well as what's considered attractive, change so drastically from era to era. Gordon Scott is ALL chest, his body a weird triangle shape but that's very 1950s body builder.
Angie's sneaking around. Will Toni wake up from her sunbathing to fight her?
• The movie wastes one giant opportunity. In the suspense sequence pictured above we think that Angie, the good "bad girl" and Toni ("introducing Scilla Gabel," an Italian actress) the evil "bad girl" are going to have a throwdown which would be a fresh bit for one of these movies but the closest we get is Toni trying to shoot Angie as she runs away from the boat where she was stealing medicine.
• The other disappointment is that there are next to no animals in the picture beyond inserted stock footage. Boo! Though we do get this glorious closeup of a lion running towards Toni -- fresh Italian meat!
• In the scene pictured above Slade spots Tarzan hiding in the trees through his binoculars. That chest is so wide no amount of foilage can hide it.
• Speaking of objectification...
Tarzan is still wearing high waisted loincloths as he has since the beginning but he's barely covering his butt again. In 1959, then, we're back to Pre-Code fleshiness only this time without as much sex-appeal since Scott is a block of wood. What's more, none of the camera work, not even a crotch-shot collapse or a bullet-dodging butt-shot, seem designed to inspire wood.
What are you going to do for an encore?
• That's a great question, Angie. We'll find out when "Swing Tarzan Swing" continues...
All Chapters:
Ch. 1 Buster Crabbe in Tarzan the Fearless (1933)
Ch. 2 Johnny Weissmuller & Maureen O'Sullivan in Tarzan and His Mate (1934)
Archive Extra: Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)
Ch. 3 Lex Barker in Tarzan's Peril (1951)
Ch. 4 Gordon Scott in Tarzan's Great Adventure (1959)
Ch. 5 Mike Henry in Tarzan and The Valley of Gold (1966)
Ch. 6 Bo Derek & Miles O'Keeffe in Tarzan the Ape Man (1980)
Ch. 7 Oscar loves Greystoke, The Legend of Tarzan: Lord of the Apes (1984)
Reader Comments (7)
The exaggerated chest thing is so weird to me. The stomachs always look like they're about the collapse, and the arms look borderline flabby. Just the weirdest deliberately cultivated body type. Meethinks it must have something to do with the military and the tendency to measure chest sizes to see if a man was healthy/fit taken to a further extreme by an overemphasis on weightlifting ffrom the 30-50s?
Connery had the body to play Tarzan
It's been a number of years since I last saw this, but I remember it as one of the best post-Weissmuller Tarzan films. The quicksand scene is a classic! And yes, a good supporting cast - especially Quayle and Connery. As for Gordon Scott, I remember thinking him quite handsome and dashing when I was younger (I was probably about 13 when I first saw this) but now the chest thing really doesn't do it for me. Oh well - the mysteries of attraction!
While Scott wasn't that great of an actor, not really even merely good, his run of Tarzans that I've seen were some of the better ones without Weissmuller. I was almost as surprised to see Connery turn up in this as I was to see Vera Miles as the female lead in Tarzan's Hidden Jungle.
His body shape is the classic of the period but does look very out of balance now, his stomach looks like it's about to collapse from the weight of his chest! Apparently that didn't bother Vera though since they were married shortly after the movie and her resultant pregnancy from the union is what cost her the lead in Vertigo.
Meant to mention the nostalgia channel Decades is running a marathon of the Tarzan TV series starring Ron Ely all weekend. It started last night and runs until the early hours of Monday morning, including a two part episode with Ethel Merman as the leader of a religious cult!!! This I gotta see!
Tarzan is like King Kong - pure fantasy and should never be
seen in a realistic way.
One of the funny things about these movies is
to observe how the era influences
the visual of the character.
Gordon Scott's shape and hair style are pure 1950's.
He's not the best actor of all time, but very good to look at.
Oh, this is such a delightful report! Somehow I feel I got here six years later. Is the author -anyone- actually going to read this?
I could not agree more with what you say about the obsession with modern heros`movies with telling and retelling us their origins. Do I need to be re-told Parker was bitten by a spider that had been swimming in a radioactive pool? As one could forget that random fact easily.
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