Tarzan's Savage Fury
Director: Cy Endfield
Year: 1952
Rating: 4.5
Well not so much Savage Fury as Slightly Annoyed. This Tarzan film never
rises to the challenge of its title. Which is a shame because it gets a few
things right, but a lot of things wrong. As is the case with most of the
RKO Tarzan films after MGM passed the franchise on. In the first MGM films
you could count on a few things - an elephant stampede stomping on the locals
and some really nasty blood curdling native tribe. At RKO they didn't have
the budget for the elephants and went kind of PC on the Africans. This is
the fourth of five in the Lex Barker series. Barker makes a good Tarzan with
his chiseled looks like a Greek Gigolo and an incredible physique and though
certainly not a good actor, he can act rings around Weissmuller. But then
so does Cheetah. After Tarzan he went on to a busy career for the rest of
his life (dying at 54 years old) with a passel of adventure films of all
kinds from Deerslayer to the Old Shatterhand films that are too expensive
for me to buy! In fact, I get the impression that a lot of these films -
solid B or low A films - are not easy to get any more.
In this one as usual Jane (the stunning Dorothy Hart who never had much of
a career) gets Tarzan into trouble. I haven't kept count but there have been
a lot of these Tarzan films in which Jane, being played by many actresses,
is as gullible as a Trump supporter, believes the intruding white men, pleads
with Tarzan to help them and of course Tarzan is a total sucker for those
eyes. In this one she says "How could I have been so stupid". Because you
are in every film and totally useless. An ornament. Every one of Barker's
films has a different actress playing Jane - with these roles it is no wonder
- call my agent, get me out of here.
Two white men show up one merry day and one of them pretends to be a cousin
of Tarzan, a Greystoke, and they convince nitwit Jane that they need to get
the diamonds of some savage tribe to help England in the war effort. Not
quite. The other white man is the Russian Rokov, who was a real villain in
the Tarzan books. So they take a leisurely stroll across crocodile infested
rivers, across a huge desert with no water and up a high mountain - all in
a day’s work. Of course, things don't go exactly as planned and Tarzan and
a native have to go back to Tarzan's hut to get proof that Tarzan's father
was a friend of the tribe years before - maybe you should have brought that
along - but while they are away all hell breaks loose and Jane is about to
be embedded on a bed of nails - which she fully deserved. Yet somehow Tarzan
and this old man manage to get to the hut and back in about - hmmm - 20 minutes.
Maybe they hailed a cab.
The best thing about the Barker films was there was no Boy. Johnny Sheffield
who would go on to the Bomba films after Tarzan was like a splinter in my
tongue - he irritated me to no end - but as soon as the credits announced
"And Introducing Tommy Carlton" I groaned - please no boy - and sure enough
Tarzan comes across this white orphan who the natives are using for bait
to catch crocodiles (I liked that part) and he takes him home. And then takes
him along on the journey. Contact the Children's Abuse Line. By the way the
Witch Doctor - always great roles in these Tarzan films - is played by Darby
Jones and he looked mildly familiar. Turns out he was in a lot of films -
obviously always in small roles - in a few other Tarzan films - in fact a
lot of jungle movies including I Walked with a Zombie. In nearly all his
appearances he was uncredited. Par for the course back then.
