Carry On Regardless (1961)

Carry On Regardless was the fifth of the Carry On films. It was released in 1961.

Carry On films in general are not renowned for complex plotting but this one is almost entirely plotless. It’s actually nothing more than a series of sketches. That’s not really a problem. The quality of the sketches is variable but most are fairly amusing. The extraordinarily strong cast helps a good deal.

The premise is that a group of desperate unemployed people have answered a newspaper advertisement placed by the Helping Hands Agency. The agency is run by Bert Handy (Sid James). The agency claims to be able to provide people to do just about any temporary job that can be imagined. Naturally the enthusiastic but hapless assortment of misfits assembled by Bert Handy usually manage to make a fairly spectacular mess of things.

They create mayhem in a hospital, on a railway station, and at an Ideal Home Exhibition. They almost manage to break up numerous marriages. They are hopeless enough when sent to the correct assignments but when the scheduling system at the Helping Hands office goes awry and they start getting sent to the wrong assignments it all becomes total chaos.

There are some quite clever moments, and even some inspired ones such as the marvellous spoof of The 39 Steps (including the famous Forth Bridge train scene).

This film has most of the early Carry On regulars - Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor, Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques. This was the final appearance by Terence Longdon who’d been made in most of the early Carry Ons and it’s the first appearance by the delightful Liz Fraser who ended up making four Carry On films. Sid James had joined the team in the previous entry, Carry On Constable, and was already becoming the star player.

The episodic format of this film meant that there were appearances in minor rôles by a truly extraordinary wealth of British comic talent - Patrick Cargill, Sydney Tafler, Fenella Fielding (who was later to be a memorable sexpot in Carry On Screaming), Eric Pohlmann, Howard Marion-Crawford and countless others.

A particular highlight is the appearance by Stanley Unwin. Unwin was a unique comic talent. His trademark was his ability to speak fluent Unwinese. This was a private nonsense language he’d invented. What made it clever was that it wasn’t mere gibberish. There was a system to the way he mangled ordinary words and it was always on the borderline between making sense and not making sense. You could more or less figure out what he was saying even when you couldn’t understand a single actual word. And it sounded like a real language and had a rhythm to it. Unwinese is used very cleverly in this film.

There’s some mildly risque stuff but it’s rather tame compared to the later Carry Ons. One of the fascinating things about the Carry On series is that they were made over a time period (1958 to 1978) that saw censorship go from being quite strict to being almost non-existent. At first it seemed like a good thing. The Carry Ons were arguably at their peak from about 1964 (Carry On Spying) to 1971 (Carry On Henry). They were able to get away with being cheerfully naughty without descending to crassness. By the late 70s crassness was becoming the order of the day and the decline of British comedy was well and truly under way. Comedy needs some limits. It needs some discipline.

Of course this time period also charts the long sad tragic decline of the British film industry which was booming in the late 50s and had become a walking corpse by the late 70s.

This is possibly the most good-natured film of the series with the crew of misfits at the Helping Hands Agency actually having a certain camaraderie and even a certain affection for one another.

On the whole the format of loosely linked sketches works well and it helps to keep the pacing brisk.

The ITV Studios DVD (part of their Carry On Ultimate Collection boxed set) offers a very good anamorphic transfer and the extras include an audio commentary featuring Liz Fraser (who interestingly enough blames the Carry On movies for wrecking her career!) and Terence Longdon.

Carry On Regardless is perhaps not one of the very best of the Carry On movies but it’s far from being the worst. In fact it's unfairly underrated. It’s consistently amusing and it can certainly be recommended.

The Thing (1982)

John W. Campbell's classic 1938 science fiction novella Who Goes There? was first brought to the screen by Howard Hawks in 1951, under the title The Thing from Another World. This is a much-revered 50s sci-fi movie although if you’re familiar with Campbell’s novella it’s a bit disappointing. Given the enormous influence that the films of Howard Hawks had on his work it’s not altogether surprising that in 1982 John Carpenter chose to do a remake, to be titled simply The Thing. Carpenter decided to stick rather more closely to Campbell’s story.

The movie opens in spectacular but enigmatic fashion, with a helicopter pursuing a dog over an icy landscape. The helicopter is piloted by a crazed Norwegian and it lands at a U.S. base in Antarctica. The helicopter has come from a nearby Norwegian base and when a group of the Americans checks out the Norwegian base they begin to get an inkling of the horror about to engulf them. Those Norwegians found a wrecked spaceship and they awakened something that had been sleeping in the ice for a hundred thousand years. That something is a shape-shifting monster.

This is essentially a paranoia story, with the paranoia made considerably worse by isolation and claustrophobia. Bad weather conditions mean the U.S. base is out of contact with the outside world. And that monster can take on the appearance of any living thing. Any of the twelve crew members at the case could have been taken over by the monster and there is absolutely no way of telling. It’s an inherently frightening idea and Carpenter extracts every ounce of terror from it.

The problem for these guys at the base is not the usual horror movie problem of how to destroy the monster, although obviously they need to do that as well. Mostly though they need to find a way to tell who’s been infected and who hasn’t, and that’s almost impossible to do.

The monster is certainly terrifying but it’s also fascinatingly ambiguous. It’s not actually evil.  It just wants to survive. It intends to do whatever it takes in order to survive. It’s like any kind of predator. To survive it has to kill. From our point of view it’s evil, but then from the point of a prey species a predator does seem evil. The monster is also absolutely and implacably alien.

The movie is about the monster but mostly it’s about the men who have to face its onslaught. They’re not soldiers and they’re not heroes. They are to some extent misfits, because after all spending very long periods of time cut off from civilisation in the middle of Antarctica is the kind of thing that is inevitably going to attract misfits. They have to function as part of a team but it doesn’t come naturally to them. They are afraid and they are suspicious. Faced with an appalling situation they have to do the best they can. Some of them do poorly and some perform fairly well.

It’s also about leadership, but it doesn’t approach the subject in the familiar Hollywood sort of way. Helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) ends up as leader because he’s the only one who is both willing to take the job on and capable of doing so. He doesn’t suggest putting the matter to a vote. When it becomes necessary he simply takes over. His main qualifications for the job are his ability to assess the situation in a brutally realistic manner and to take whatever steps need to be taken. If that requires shooting someone who gets in his way then he’s quite prepared to do so. He’s a leader, not a contestant in a popularity contest. He doesn’t care if he’s obeyed out of fear rather than love, as long as he’s obeyed. He’s really a quiet inoffensive kind of guy but he knows what has to be done and he accepts the consequences.

There is one weakness which Carpenter alludes to in the audio commentary - there are twelve main characters and they’re not very well defined. There are a number of characters who really serve no purpose other than to distract and confuse the audience. Eliminating two or three of the characters would have enabled the remaining characters to be developed in a bit more depth.

Having said this I have to add that the acting is generally extremely good.

This is a visually stunning movie. It’s not just the special effects. The location photography is gorgeous, the sets are terrific, Dean Cundey’s cinematography is breathtaking. This was Carpenter’s first big-budget major studio movie and every penny of the budget is well spent. There are also some extraordinary action scenes with as many explosions as an action fan could wish for, and some very cool flamethrower sequences.

One of the things that makes this film so visually arresting is the constant juxtaposition of ice and fire. Fire is virtually the only effective weapon against the monster and fire seems particularly menacing in a landscape of snow and ice and bitter cold. And there’s no question that explosions look particularly impressive in an icy landscape.

The Thing proved to be a bit of a box-office disaster. Various reasons have been suggested for this. My feeling is that this movie has an identity crisis. The outrageous totally over-the-top gore tends to mark this down as a trashy drive-in movie for teenagers. But it’s not a trashy drive-in movie for teenagers. It’s a thoughtful, intelligent and rather serious science fiction movie exploring some interesting themes. It’s a movie about men under extreme pressure, it’s about fear and suspicion, it’s about trust and what happens when trust becomes impossible, it’s about doing what has to be done even when it’s very unpleasant. But what audiences tended to notice was the violence and the gore.

This movie is also notable for having not a single female character, not even in a bit part, for which it was (quite absurdly) attacked by some critics.

The Thing looks great on Blu-Ray. There’s more than one Blu-Ray release. There’s a barebones release and there’s a special edition release with lots of special features. That’s the one to go for because, among other extras, it includes an audio commentary by John Carpenter and Kurt Russell and their commentaries are always a joy.

The Thing’s reputation has grown considerably since its release. Despite the excessiveness of the gore it’s an extremely fine exercise in science fiction horror and it’s highly recommended.

Escape from New York (1981)

Escape from New York is John Carpenter’s iconic 1981 science fiction action adventure flick about breaking into the world’s toughest prison. The prison is Manhattan. In the future world of the movie the whole of Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security prison, this being seen as the only answer to the ever-increasing crime problem.

This is a prison that nobody ever leaves. Once you’re there you’re there for life. There are no guards on the island. The prisoners can do whatever the hell they like. Nobody cares. The whole island is surrounded by walls, minefields, sophisticated surveillance system, helicopter patrols, you name it. No-one has managed to escape. Escape truly is impossible.

But in this story the problem is that first it’s going to be necessary not to break out but to break into the prison, and then get out again. The reason it’s necessary to get in is that the President of the United States is there. His plane was hijacked by urban terrorists. Not only that, the President has with him an incredibly vital recording and that recording is going to be needed within 24 hours at a major international conference. The fate of the world depends on that recording. Which means there’s a time limit. The President has to be extracted and it has to be done within 24 hours.

And it can’t be done by conventional means because the President has fallen into the hands of some very nasty people and if they see a single helicopter or a single soldier trying to mount a rescue mission they’ll kill the President immediately.

The man in charge of the prison is Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) and he has a plan. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is a slightly psychotic ex-special forces guy turned bank robber and he’s about to be sent to the Manhattan Prison. Hauk offers him a full pardon if he can get the President out. The task is impossible but Snake Plissken may just be mean enough and crazy enough to pull it off.

Needless to say there’s a fair amount of mayhem once Snake is infiltrated into the prison (by glider). Snake manages to accumulate a number of allies. They’re vicious and/or entirely untrustworthy but that doesn’t bother Snake. What matters is that they may be useful to him. These allies include Cabby (Ernest Borgnine) who seems to be New York’s only surviving cab driver, and also Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and his girlfriend Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau). Brain is a kind of scientific advisor to the self-appointed Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes).

There’s plenty of violence and it can get fairly brutal at times although it’s not as extreme as you might expect. There’s certainly no actual gore.

The acting is a major strength of the film. Kurt Russell is terrific as the totally amoral totally ruthless Snake, a man more cut out to be a villain but in the insane and evil world of the movie he’s the closest thing there is to a hero. Snake just doesn’t care about anything, which is why he has a chance of succeeding. Lee Van Cleef as Hauk is pretty similar to Snake. He’s ruthless and amoral but he happens to be, technically at least, one of the good guys. Isaac Hayes is suitably malevolent. Ernest Borgnine and Harry Dean Stanton both put plenty of enthusiasm into their performances.

Donald Pleasence plays the President. He’s also technically one of the good guys, and he’s also in reality just as ruthless and amoral as Snake Plissken. The only difference is that being a politician he adds hypocrisy to the mix of endearing personality features.

The movie was made on a budget of around six-and-a-half million dollars. That was a lot more than Carpenter’s previous films but Escape from New York is an insanely ambitious movie for such a budget. The extraordinary thing is that visually it works, and works very well indeed. The special effects were done ultra cheaply and they look splendid. The whole look of the movie is dark and sinister and incredibly hostile. The visual style has been copied countless times since.

This is a move made entirely with old school special effects. Everything is done with animation, or miniatures, or matte paintings or the other techniques that pre-dated CGI. When you take this, and the low budget, into consideration Carpenter’s achievement really is phenomenal. This movie is an object lesson in what you can achieve visually with talent, imagination and hard work.

Insofar as the movie has a message it seems to be that the only thing that does more harm to society than out-of-control violence is out-of-control law enforcement. The world of Escape from New York is a complete moral vacuum. When men like Snake Plissken and Hauk look like heroes you have a society that has a lot of problems. This is a fairly bleak dystopian tale. What’s interesting is that we don’t get any glimpses of what “normal” society looks like.

I’m not saying that it’s all that profound in the political and social points it makes. It does have a fair amount of leftover 70s cynicism and paranoia. At least we don’t get any speeches.

The Region 4 Special Edition DVD comes with a pleasing swag of extras including two audio commentaries. The really good news is that one of the commentary tracks features John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. There’s nothing more enjoyable than hearing Carpenter and Russell talking about the movies they made together.

This movie is stylish and it’s fun and it was a definite hit. There would be lots of violent action movies made in the following couple of decades but Escape from New York has a bit more class than most of them, and Snake Plissken as played by Kurt Russell is one of the great action heroes. Highly recommended.

The Village of the Damned (1995)

There are certain movies that I tend to go out of my way to avoid seeing, for varying reasons. One of the movies I’ve avoided is John Carpenter’s 1995 version of The Village of the Damned. In this particular case my reasons for avoiding the movie were quite clear-cut. First off, I liked Wolf Rilla’s 1960 version so much I couldn’t see how anyone could possibly improve on it. Secondly, I’ve always disliked movies that Americanise English subject matter. In this case my second objection is even stronger than usual, given that John Wyndham was perhaps the most quintessentially English of all science fiction writers. And The Midwich Cuckoos was the most quintessentially English of Wyndham’s novels. An adaptation of that novel set in the United States sounded like a seriously poor idea.

Nonetheless the 1995 version of The Village of the Damned is a John Carpenter movie and I do generally like John Carpenter movies, so I have set aside my prejudices and here I am reviewing it.

One day everybody in the town of Midwich loses consciousness. All the animals lose consciousness as well. Some hours later they all regain consciousness. No-one has any idea what has happened or why. The government has sent Dr Susan Verner (Kirstie Alley) to investigate. While she’s certainly a doctor it’s reasonable to assume that she has some intimate connections with the intelligence community.

It soon becomes apparent that every single woman of child-bearing age in Midwich is pregnant and they all fell pregnant on the day of the unexplained blackout. It’s obvious that something very strange is going on. There is simply no possible way that some of these women could be pregnant, but they are. And they all decide to keep their babies.

The children grow up very fast. They are extremely bright but lack any kind of empathy. They’re not actually emotionless - in fact they display an excessively emotional need for revenge if they suffer any injury or even a minor inconvenience. This is one of the elements in the story that worked fine in the 1960 movie but seems inconsistent and meddled in this version.

Dr Verner is still hanging around and giving the impression she knows more than she’s prepared to reveal publicly. She seems to have been added to the story to give it a bit of an X-Files vibe, with a vague suggestion that maybe the government knows more than it’s prepared to let on as well. She chain smokes through the move so you could describe her as the movie’s faintly sinister Cigarette Smoking Woman.

The children become more obviously evil. It’s not just Midwich’s future that looks bleak, these kids could be a threat to the whole planet.

There are so many things wrong with this movie that it’s hard to know where to start. There’s no subtlety in the portrayal of the children. Right from the start they are clearly Demon Children From Hell and their evilness is so blatant you have to wonder why everybody else in the town doesn’t just leave. For the story to work it’s necessary that the women should make serious attempts to bond with the children and should be genuinely emotionally conflicted about them. Nobody could be emotionally conflicted about these little horrors. It’s also necessary that the strangeness of the children should be revealed slowly, so that at first it’s still possible for people to convince themselves that they’re just normal kids. All of this was done successfully in the 1960 film and the 1995 film fails on every count.

There’s a much bigger problem. John Wyndham had a deep love for traditional English society, and he felt that things were changing rapidly and not necessarily for the better. The Midwich Cuckoos is a kind of allegory of the rise of soulless mass society. The Midwich of his novel was a creation that the author cared about and the reader cannot help feeling emotionally involved in the tragic fate that seems to be the village’s destiny. All of that is lost in Carpenter’s film. His Midwich is already soulless so why would anybody care if it’s threatened?

The characters are dull and the acting is dull. Terrible things happen to the local doctor, Dr Chaffee, but Christopher Reeve’s performance is so colourless and uninvolved that Dr Chaffee is even more robotic than the demon children. The other actors make no impression whatsoever and their characters are so uninteresting that I found it difficult to keep track of them.

Kirstie Alley tries to be cynical and sinister but she doesn’t really have the acting chops to make Dr Verner anything more than a cipher.

The special effects are OK but they’re not really any improvement on the 1960 movie.

There are some minor changes to the story, notably in regard to the David character, but they’re muddled and unconvincing.

By 1995 Carpenter’s once promising career was definitely on the skids. He no longer had enough commercial clout to be given the level of creative control necessary to do something interesting with the material and he knew it. He didn’t want to make The Village of the Damned and he didn’t have final cut and he had major disagreements with the studio and it seems likely that he just lost interest and was only thinking of the pay cheque. It’s ironic that the commercial failures that derailed his career were in fact some of the best and most interesting movies of his career (movies like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China). This must have been more than a little disillusioning. Unfortunately The Village of the Damned was not the sort of movie that was going to get his career back on track.

The overwhelming impression I get from this movie is pointlessness. It’s inferior in every way to the 1960 film and it adds absolutely nothing of value to the story.

I found myself not caring what happened to Midwich or its inhabitants who seemed no more convincingly human than the evil alien children.

I really can’t think of any reason whatsoever why anyone would want to see this movie.

The Bat (1959)

By 1959 the Old Dark House movie was getting rather long in the tooth as a concept but it was a genre that seemingly just wouldn’t die. The 1959 The Bat, directed by Crane Wilbur and starring Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead, was yet another version of the venerable stage hit written by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood. There had been a silent version in 1926 and a sound version (with the title The Bat Whispers in 1930).

Agnes Moorehead plays popular mystery writer Cornelia van Gorder who has rented a spooky mansion called The Oaks. She and her secretary Lizzie (Lenita Lane) are alone in the house because the entire domestic staff has quit. They’re afraid of The Bat, a mysterious killer who has been terrorising the local community. They’re also afraid of actual bats, following a newspaper report that the bats in this area are infected with rabies.

The Oaks belongs to the local bank president, a man named Fleming. He’s gone off on a hunting trip with his physician, Dr Malcolm Wells.

A very large amount of money has been embezzled from the bank and the nice young bank vice-president, Victor Bailey, has been arrested for the crime.

There are at least three major sub-plots and the connections between them are pretty tenuous.

There are all the standard ingredients of the Old Dark House film. There are secret passageways and masked villains and lots of running about and screaming.

It’s Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead who make this movie worth seeing, insofar as it’s worth seeing at all. The other cast members are distinctly unmemorable.

Price gives one of his more understated performances but of course he still manages to be pretty creepy.

Moorehead was a much admired actress and this film gives her a rare chance to play a leading rôle. And she has a great deal of fun as the feisty mystery novelist.

Crane Wilbur, who write and directed The Bat, had a lengthy career in film, starting as an actor and moving on to directing. A lengthy career, but not a particularly distinguished one.

Creaky is the word that is inevitably going to be used when describing this movie. Not only does it belong to a genre whose glory days were the 1930s, it really does feel very 1930s stylistically as well. There’s a heavy reliance on shadowy outlines of sinister figures to provide scares. Compared to the horror movies that were being made by Hammer at about this time it must have seemed pretty tame even to contemporary audiences.

Of course any Old Dark House movie is going to have that problem of feeling dated. It’s an inherently very old-fashioned concept. The original play made its Broadway debut in 1920, so it actually pre-dates what we think of as the golden age of the detective story. The difficulty with trying to revive The Bat as a movie in 1959 is that it was either going to feel very old-fashioned, or it was going to end up with a high camp feel. The movie mostly ends up just being old-fashioned.

I personally like old-fashioned things, and I have a certain fondness for the genre but even back in the 30s Old Dark House movies were something of a hit and miss proposition.

There are numerous public domain version of the his movie floating around. Surprisingly enough it’s actually had not only an official DVD release but a Blu-Ray release as well. The version I saw was a public domain copy and the quality was atrocious. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you would bother spending real money buying the Blu-Ray or the apparently excellent Anchor Bay DVD. This really is not the kind of movie you’re likely to watch again and again.

If you’re a hardcore fan of Vincent Price or Agnes Moorehead you might get some enjoyment from this movie, otherwise you’d have to be a pretty enthusiastic devotee of Old Dark House films to bother with this one. If you want a really good Old Dark House movie, check out One Frightened Night or Tomorrow at Seven.

The Fog (1980)

The Fog is an early John Carpenter film that manages to be classic gothic horror whilst still having a very contemporary feel. It’s an old-fashioned ghost story but with some of the techniques of the slasher film. When the movie was completed it was realised that a 1980 audience was going to expect much more overt thrills so extensive reshoots were done. The movie ended up doing surprisingly well at the box office despite being a bit of a hybrid.

The little seaside town of Antonio Bay in northern California is celebrating its one hundredth birthday. Antonio Bay is a quiet little town. In fact the last time anything exciting happened here was a hundred years go when a ship called the Elizabeth Dane was wrecked in the bay, the disaster being caused by a mysterious fog. That event led to the foundation of the town.

Gothic horror often involves a curse, and the curse is often a collective one, falling upon an entire family. In this case it’s the entire town that is under the curse. That curse is the consequence of certain terrible things that happened exactly a century ago.

It starts with odd things happening. Car alarms going off for no reason, windows shattering, lights inexplicably flashing on and off. And there’s a fog, just as there had been in 1880. The fog is heading straight for a fishing trawler, the Sea Grass.

The local priest knows what’s going on. He’s found an old diary that recounts the events of that night in 1880 and reading that diary has almost sent the good priest over the edge of madness.

Now the unearthly fog of 1880 has returned and there’s something evil and deadly in that fog.

Carpenter started making horror movies at a time when a certain amount of gore was pretty much required if you expected to get a commercial release. While Carpenter didn’t seem to object to gore he didn’t really need it. He was good enough to scare us without the gore. In The Fog he doesn’t overdo it. In fact there’s a lot of implied gore. There are ultra-violent killings but you don’t really see much at all. The violence was mostly added in the reshoots.

What Carpenter did have was a very fine talent for atmosphere. In The Thing he uses the Arctic wastes and the horror of snow and ice with terrifying effectiveness. In The Fog his setting is a picturesque California seaside town but he still manages to build some incredibly creepy atmosphere.

And Carpenter certainly had the technical skills. He keeps the tension ratcheted up very nicely and when he throws in his scares they do scare.

The Fog has a pretty decent cast. Adrienne Barbeau as the radio station owner and operator (effectively it’s a one-woman radio station), Jamie Lee Curtis as hitch-hiker Elizabeth Solley, Janet Leigh (who was of course Jamie Lee’s real-life mom) as Antonio Bay’s chief civic booster Kathy Williams and Tom Atkins as the closest thing the film has to a conventional hero are all very solid and Hal Holbrook is fun as the well-meaning whisky priest.

The location shooting is impressive and even includes a couple of scenes shot at locations used by Hitchcock in The Birds. The radio station in the light house is a rather cool idea.

Carpenter’s biggest cinematic influence was not a horror director but Howard Hawks. Carpenter’s career has essentially been an attempt to do horror, sci-fi and adventure movies in the Hawks style.

Carpenter also cites Lovecraft as a major influence on The Fog, and there are certainly some Lovecraftian touches.

The Fog is a low-budget movie (it cost just over a million dollars at the time) but the special effects are very effective. Carpenter is smart enough not to try anything too ambitious. It’s better to stick to simple effects that work and that’s what he does. The ghosts look very creepy. The fog looks mysterious and menacing.

The Region 4 DVD offers a nice anamorphic transfer. The film was shot in the 2.35:1 aspect ration that Carpenter preferred (and used with such skill). There’s a lively and chatty and very worthwhile audio commentary by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill. Carpenter is a guy who gives the impression that he absolutely loves doing audio commentaries for his movies.

The Fog manages to combine the visceral thrills of the slasher film with the moodiness and spookiness of the traditional ghost story and it’s a blend that works very well indeed. One of Carpenter’s best, and certainly one of the best horror movies of its era. Highly recommended.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)

Tarzan the Ape Man was the first of the MGM Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan (although there had been plenty of previous Tarzan movies going back as early as 1918). Tarzan the Ape Man was a major hit and spawned numerous sequels. The MGM Tarzan movies defined the character for several generations of movie-goers.

There are some crucial differences between Tarzan as played by Johnny Weissmuller and the Tarzan of the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (starting with Tarzan of the Apes in 1914). The Burroughs version of Tarzan is not an illiterate child of the jungle. Although raised by apes he has acquired an education from books. He belongs to both civilised society and to ape society. Someone at MGM decided that their Tarzan would be more popular if they quietly dropped the civilised side of the character. Given the enormous success enjoyed by the films it may well be that it was the right decision although it is a pity that so much of the complexity of the character is lost.

The movie begins with James Parker (C. Aubrey Smith) and Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) hoping to get out of Africa, but they intend to leave the continent as rich men. Their plan is to find the legendary elephants’ graveyard where a fortune in ivory awaits them. The problem is that no-one knows the location of this graveyard and there’s no point in asking the natives since all the tribes are united on one point - anyone who knows the location must die. Parker and Holt however have quite accidentally stumbled upon a very promising lead.

They set off into the jungle with one unexpected additional member in their party. Parker’s daughter Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) has just arrived in Africa and insists on joining the expedition.

It takes a very long time for Tarzan to make his appearance in Tarzan the Ape Man. This means of course that the audience is eagerly looking forward to his entrance and when he does arrive he does so in some style.

By the time Tarzan appears the expedition has already encountered some formidable obstacles and dangers. The crossing of the river on rafts, the river being infested with hundreds of angry hippos and a few hungry crocodiles as well, is a superb action-adventure set-piece.

Tarzan and Jane meet under somewhat informal circumstances - he kidnaps her and carries her off to his treetop lair. Jane spends the rest of the movie hurtling back and forth between her old life with her father and her new life with Tarzan.

In this movie Tarzan encounters European civilisation for the first time and the encounter does not go at all smoothly. In fact it’s close to open war. Harry Holt’s hotheadedness is a major contributing factor. Harry likes to shoot things and he tends to do so without giving it a second thought. This does not endear him to Tarzan, especially on those occasions when Tarzan is the target.

Tarzan’s encounter with Jane proceeds much more satisfactorily. Tarzan can’t talk but that’s OK because Jane does enough talking for both of them. In fact she does as much talking as a dozen normal people. This girl just never stops talking, although she and Tarzan also seem to manage pretty well with certain non-verbal forms of communication.

There’s plenty of action with an endless supply of marauding lions and leopards and Tarzan getting chased (and very nearly caught) by crocodiles plus of course there are the much-feared murderous dwarves. Not pygmies, we are distinctly told that these are dwarves not pygmies. And they have some nasty plans for Jane’s father and for Harry Holt.

The director was W.S. Van Dyke, more renowned for his efficiency than his brilliance but he handles the action pretty well. There is of course a great deal of stock footage, and some process shots that are amusing in their outrageous obviousness.

This movie is available on DVD but I caught it on cable TV so I can’t tell you anything about the quality of the DVDs. The TV print I saw was in reasonably good condition.

This film is of course very very politically incorrect. It’s also plenty of fun (strange how politically incorrect movies do tend to be fun). There’s adventure and there’s romance. Tarzan and His Mate followed two years later and is even better (and it ups the eroticism very significantly).

Tarzan the Ape Man is important historically in that it established the formula for most of the countless Tarzan movies that would follow and it’[s worth seeing it for its own sake. Recommended.