Tarzan and the She-Devil
Director: Kurt Neumann
Year: 1953
Rating: 4.5
This is the fifth and final Tarzan film in the Lex Barker series. It is as
usual fairly mediocre. So it begs the question - why do I keep watching Tarzan
films? I went through all the Johnny Weissmuller films and the last six of
those once the franchise left MGM just got worse and worse. Barker took over
that series after Weissmuller left but the films were at best ok, at worst
cheap and boring. But my affection for Tarzan clearly goes back to my childhood
and has stuck with me like tar paper on the bottom of my shoe for years.
Not only are they usually not very good but even the good ones - the early
Weissmuller films - are so politically incorrect now with dreadful stereotypes
of natives, a pro-colonial sympathy, the fact that a White Man is the King
of the jungle and he took as his wife a white woman. Though in their favor
is the fact that the whites who invade the jungle with their greed are the
worst characters in the films and usually end up dead.
In some ways I have become more sensitive to political correctness of older
films and in some ways not. I am not troubled by Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto
being played by white actors - that was just very common back then - not
right but they did that for every nationality. It is different now and so
I can look at those films as cultural curiosities. But on the other hand
I have no desire to watch the old Westerns - that I used to love - John Ford
for heavens sake - in which Indians are slaughtered. They were fighting for
their homeland. How can you root for the white man? Same with films like
Zulu. How I loved that film, but am I supposed to cheer for the British imperialists.
I understand it is just a movie but it is hard to keep out one's political
consciousness.
As I was saying this is not so good but could have been so much better with
just a touch of ambition. It just looks so cheap with a "jungle" that looks
like it would be a nice weekend walk and lots of stock shots of animals.
It is a basic Tarzan plot - two white men and a woman (the She-Devil of the
title) show up looking for ivory and to kill a huge herd of elephants to
get it. Tarzan doesn't play that game though but when he thinks Jane (Joyce
Mackenzie, yet another actress to play the role) has been killed he goes
into a deep depression instead of wanting to kill the people responsible.
Nobody wants to see a mopey Tarzan. And Jane as usual is a complete and utter
idiot. Always since Maureen O'Sullivan left the series (or in truth the series
left her). Jane could have been a great feminist character - she gave up
a life of leisure to live in a tree house in the jungle - and perhaps in
the books she is - but in the films she is always helpless and incredibly
naïve. Here she is woken up by Tarzan who demands she cook breakfast.
The two white man are played by two of my favorites - both sort of in the
career doldrums - one sort of fated to stay that way, the other to become
a huge TV star. Tom Conway had played The Falcon and Bulldog Drummond, his
British suavity was always his trademark (perhaps not as suave as his brother
George Sanders but then who was). He never really got into the A list but
I always enjoy him. The other actor had basically become a heavy, a thug
in a series of film noirs in the 1940's. Overweight and menacing, he had
some terrific performances in these films but by the 1950s noir was thinning
out and he was taking roles in films like this, Gorilla at Large, Bride of
the Gorilla and such (though with a small but famous role in a Hitchcock
film). Then he got an offer a few years after this - that of playing Hamilton
Burger initially but then Perry Mason. But he had to lose 60 pounds. He did.
Raymond Burr. One of the greatest TV shows ever.
