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 Tarzan of the Apes
(1918)
Director:
Scott Sidney
Stars: Elmo Lincoln, Enid Markey
Release Company:
Madacy Entertainment
MPAA Rating: NR
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Adventures of Tarzan
Masterprint
Buy at AllPosters.com
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Around the turn of the twentieth century, the most popular form of entertainment media were pulp magazines, printed on cheap paper and selling for a dime or so. They had garish cover art, and contained exciting fiction—westerns, adventure, historical fiction, romance, science fiction, and accounts of foreign lands. Combined with the short stories were addicting serials that assured the magazine of continual sales—remember this was long before television and films were in their infancy. One work of fiction equivalent to a blockbuster was released in October of 1912—Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes—Romance of the Jungle.
Over 80 films have used the tale of Tarzan for subject matter, including swimmer Johnny Weissmuller's series of films in the 1930s and 1940s, the reasonably faithful 1984 Greystroke: The Legend of Tarzan, bare-bosomed Bo Derek's horrific banana-eating 1981 bomb, and Disney's surprisingly well-done 1999 feature cartoon. Overlooked in the rush to preserve the ape-man on celluloid is the original 1918 silent version starring Elmo Lincoln.
Filmed just six years after Edgar Rice Burroughs' story first appeared in All-Story magazine, director Scott Sidney's clumsy Tarzan of the Apes remains far truer to the text than most subsequent film versions. For the first few minutes stock footage of an Africa now sadly long gone appears—terrain teeming with antelope, lions, giraffes, and elephants while crocodile logjams crowd the river. The opening nostalgic celluloid safari alone makes this film more worthwhile than some subsequent versions—it must have mesmerized 1918 moviegoers.
After the establishing shots, the film steadfastly sticks to the "facts" of Burrough's fiction with Lord Greystoke planning a trip to British Africa to put a stop to Arab slave trading. To keep audience attention the filmmaker inserts out of sequence shots of a silhouetted teen Tarzan beating his chest in the jungle, some 13 years before he's even born.
Those who've read the original story, or have seen the recent Disney version will recognize the storyline of how the Greystokes are put ashore after a mutiny, set up a makeshift lodging in the African jungle, and have a baby boy. At Tarzan's birth, the film shows a leopard outside pawing at the door to get in. He doesn't make it; however, Lady Alice dies before the boy is a year old, only communicated through a placard, and Lord Greystoke's melodramatic note:
Alice is dead and our baby is crying for nourishment. What shall I do?
Coincidentally, ape mother Kala (an uncredited actor ill-fitted in a very amateurish ape costume) has lost her baby, so she takes on baby Tarzan and raises him as her own.
Early silent films tend to jump in time even more than modern films, so after one fadeout, Tarzan ages ten years and Gordon Griffith takes over as teen Tarzan. Young Griffith, who will again star in another Elmo Lincoln Tarzan film, doesn't have to do too much other than beat his chest, look wide-eyed, and wrestle a bit with the fake apes (making sure he keeps his naked frontside away from the camera). The nakedness problem gets a humorous placard solution when the boy sees some native humans taking a swim: "Clothes—at the bottom of his little English heart survived a longing for them."
An even jumpier transition occurs from lithe young Griffith to the mature Elmo Lincoln version of Tarzan. It's like going from chicken broth to Campbell's extra chunky style soup—if you can imagine a 90 lb. kid transforming into a stocky 250 lb. thirty year old in the span of a few seconds. Lincoln has the shifting eyes down pat for the silent cinema even if he does lumber through the tree limbs awkwardly. Before a dramatic struggle with an African native, he looks left—then right—stares straight ahead—grins—then creeps around the native's backside before putting a "sleeper hold" on the victim. The WWF would do well to study Elmo's moves for more melodramatic flair.
The video soundtrack with Mendelsson's Italian Symphony and Dvorák's New World Symphony is tacked on awkwardly, failing to match the film's action. But Sidney never planned for such a format. Ideally, this film should be seen in a full theater with a live organist, who can add grace notes to the visual melodrama and add humor to Lincoln's poses.
Plot holes are plentiful, one being the rapidity that Tarzan takes to the English language, but that allows him to leave a cryptic note that is one of the film's high points. When Jane and other Britains seeking the rumored "ape boy" arrive, Tarzan writes a note to tack on his door to keep the intruders away:
This is the house of Tarzan, Killer of wild beasts. Touch not the things that are his. . .
Tarzan of the Apes renders anything but subtleties. Instead of back-story, the film introduces characters like Tarzan's elephant friend Tantar with a single placard, but it straightforwardly conveys the basic Burroughs’ story and has charms.
As with many early century American films, it reflects the values of its day. Elements of racism are clearly prevalent as the cultures of the Africans and British are contrasted, most blatantly after Tarzan has killed a tribal chief and the tribe all pays homage to the white man, hoping that they can appease him. Another more subtle reference comes as the British party is arriving. Two men discuss the idea of evolution and how they are seeking their ancestors, referring to Darwin—immediately the film cuts to their black servant girl, who behaves in stereotypical fashion throughout the film.
Very few stores will have this original silent in stock, so Tarzan of the Apes will be a tough find, but well worth a rental if silent films interest. Clocking in at just over an hour, the pace works fine and doesn't overstay its welcome in the DVD player.
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