TARZAN ESCAPES! (1936) ** I'll never stop thrilling to the sight of a grown man squaring and shooting his gun at a screen showing footage of a lion running at him. The advertisements boasted that it was "Amazing! 2 years to produce!", but the most amazing part is that most playgrounds could have generated more original ideas in five minutes. The backdrops are also somewhat amazing-several of them are so ridiculous that they could have served as early Yes album covers. It would be difficult to render a more faithful re-make of Tarzan and His Mate if that was the entire goal, and the scant two years in between probably wasn't enough for anyone to completely to process even the more forgettable scenes. Once again conniving people are showing up from London, once again it takes nearly one/third of the film before they can find Johnny Weismuller or Maureen O'Sullivan. When they do, it turns out that fashions for jungle ladies have become somewhat more conservative, apparently at the request of the suits in Hollywood. Maureen redeems herself by having nightmares about playing Bridge. Tarzan stretches and primps in a manner that strongly suggests access to bodybuilding magazines. They finally make use of his great swimming skills, but in an underwater ballet. What slight variations of plot they've managed find Jane disingenuous to the slight extent that she's able, leading me to wish that Tarzan would say "Go! Go, Jane! Go, Jane, go! Go fast! Go, just, go!", but it doesn't happen. That bit about Tarzan putting himself in a cage because his lover wants him to, and then the futility of his trying to get out, is an extremely powerful, if unintentional, metaphor. That they show an elephant trying to get him out of the cage for about 45 minutes is just unintentionally boring. For all that there's more room for disappointment in wasting a cool cast than righteous indignation about the aesthetics. Herbert Mundin is a tremendous addition, and the scene where Cheetah the chimp is laughing at him is among the best in the franchise. Cheetah also figures in a good scene where he appears to have an anxiety attack due to Tarzan's irresponsible behavior. The simple reality is, basically, that there's no way anyone with a heart could vote against Johnny and Maureen for long; their soft lens love scene is so silly (though not nearly as ridiculous as anything in Tarzan, the Ape Man) that you just wish that someone had already written the Love Theme from The Breakfast Club for them. Anthropology majors take note-there were "good" Africans, who would do what they were told, go get what they were told to get, and let white people whip them; and there were "bad" Africans who put paint on their head and wore mohawks and inexplicably tried to run the white devils back out. Compare, contrast, and project against the current situation in the Middle East.
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