Tarzan’s Fight For Life (1958) – Review

After wading through a fair few classic Tarzan movies as a result of reviewing them for this site, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s usually only two kinds of adventure that our muscular hero embarked on: ones where he faces off against dastardly trappers or duplicitous hunters, and ones where he fights evil or misled tribes of natives. There’s often an overlap of course, but it really does come down to one of two camps and while the battles Tarzan has against morals-free great white hunters tend to be the more entertaining of the two, that second option can often prove to be more than a little problematic.
This brings us to 1958’s dramatically titled Tarzan’s Fight For Life, which not only was the last official time the franchise utilised some of the classic tropes, buy also based the majority of its plot on a story about natives causing troubles due to their religious beliefs. Harmless adventure movie or awkward racial issues? Time to swing in and find out.

Tension is building between a makeshift hospital run by Dr Sturdy who is using his modern medicine to heal as many people as he can and Futa, the witch doctor of the deeply superstitious Nagasu tribe who feels that this new fangled “magic” is becoming a massive threat to his livelihood. As a result, he’s managed to whip his people into a frenzy by spreading lies and misinformation about Sturdy’s practice and even goes as far as to convince some of his fellow tribesmen to attack Sturdy’s assistant and his daughter’s fiancée, Dr Ken Warwick in order to prove his point.
Thankfully, as always, Tarzan swings in and beats the shit out of the natives like Hulk Hogan clearing a ring full of jobbers back in the 80s and he maintains that the hospital is under his protection despite Futa trying other, more underhanded methods to get what he wants. It’s a good thing that Tarzan swung by too, as it seems that Jane is having some rather serious issues with her appendix and needs to be admitted due to the steadily growing pain in which she’s in. However, after her operation, Futa manages to hypnotise one of Sturdy’s native assistants into trying to take her life which you can imagine is only going to piss Tarzan off even more.
However, the plot thickens when it’s learned that the infant chief of the Nagasu has contracted the same sickness that killed his noble father and Futa realises that if he sends his henchmen, Ramo, to steal some of Sturdy’s medicine, he can palm it off as his own magic and cement his claims that the white man’s hospital must be destroyed. However, Ramo isn’t the most avid of readers and the bottle he swipes is marked clearly with the words “virulent poison”, so can Tarzan infiltrate the Nagasu village and save the chief before Futa’s petty rage destroys everything?

So before we get into the real meat of the matter, there’s a few things about Tarzan’s Fight For Life that truly deserve a mention. For a start, the series has randomly decided to insert Jane and Boy (now finally granted the name Tartu) back into the franchise, although the wouldn’t last long as this movie is technically the last appearance of the two in an official Tarzan movie for bloody ages as the films strove to make Gordon Scott’s ape man more of a free and single jungle crimefighter more in the realms of the original adventure stories. Of course, due to a snafu with an attempt to make a Tarzan, Jane and Boy television series that failed, three pilot episodes were fused together to make Tarzan And The Trappers that sort of went against where the series would finally go, but despite this, this is truly where the buck would stop for Tarzan’s long time family unit. Also leaving the series (despite technically also coming back one more time thanks to the Tarzan And The Trappers issue) was longtime producer Sol Lesser who had been connected with the series for bloody ages, but in his absence, the moves to make Tarzan a more self sufficient adventurer who suddenly would stop speaking in broken English too.
However, while this would lead to some of the best Tarzan movies ever made (Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure is a fucking cracker of a flick), we still had to get through Tarzan’s Fight For Life, and while it carries some surprisingly weighty themes and a more thoughtful tone, the manner in which it goes about it kind of thwarts what it’s trying to achieve. I am, of course, referring to the use of the African characters as confused, easily led and superstitious savages who will happily let members of their own tribe die simply because their crooked witch doctor thinks that letting a white dude perform a blood transfusion is a bunch of bullshit.

While I completely understand that in the context of the story and during the time it was made, such a storyline makes perfect sense and even carries themes of how being so devoutly superstitious and hateful can cost lives, the sight of so many black actors having to mug their way through proceedings clad in face paint and thick accents proves to be a little uncomfortable. Worse yet, the scenes where actual tribes people are used in location footage only further goes to show how gaudy and ridiculous the Hollywood versions are and despite the villainous efforts of James Edwards and Woody Strode, it’s an aspect of the movies that continue to age as poorly as a pitcher of milk left in the middle of the Serengeti. Yes, the film attempts to provide some balance by including complaints within the Nagasu about Futa’s practices and I suppose it means well,  but it’s still a movie about white guys teaching black guys the error of their “savage” ways and I can’t help but feel a bit iffy whenever I see it.
Beyond the obvious white saviour shenanigans, Tarzan’s Fight For Life goes a little easier on the action than some other Tarzan movies in favour of a slower tone to fully take in its message about how we should all believe in the science which is especially amusing considering all the rampant theories that came up during COVID. But while we get moments of Gordon Scott flamboyantly beating up tribesmen and a truly bizarre moment where Tarzan opts to ride a giraffe that looks like it’s the most uncomfortable act for both of them, major acts of daring do are jettisoned in order to keep the escalating drama in focus. This is more of a race against time than a simple brawl fest that has numerous moving parts and more subtle perils that a marauding crocodile or rescuing Boy from a giant spider’s web.

As a result, certain aspects of Tarzan’s Fight For Life ironically feel ahead of its time, forgoing the more outlandish lures of a lost city or the more clean cut villainy of a hunter pillaging nature for his own ends, however, while Tarzan usually leaps from tree to tree with the grace of a man born to the jungle, the racial aspects of the film tend to be as ungainly and clumsy as the sight of our hero clingingly haphazardly to the back of that fucking giraffe.
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