If there was a noticable flaw with Mike Henry’s tenure as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ lion grappling, vine travelling adventurer, is that his trio of Tarzan movies were all filmed back to back and then let loose into cinemas at the rate of one a year. This created something of an interesting risk, because if the filmmakers had misjudged the tone or plot of the first film, they had no way to adjust the other two, meaning that they potentially had three unbroken years of stinkers to unleash on a notoriously fickle public.
While it would be slightly unfair to label the last official entries of the classic franchise as mere “stinkers”, you can’t deny that Henry’s various rumbles on the jungles were very by-the-numbers and constantly borrowed whole plot chunks from previous movies (how many times have we randomly taken time out from the main story to let Tarzan brawl to the death with a crocodile?) and if we’re being honest, Tarzan And The Great River tends to go very much with a derivative current.
Continuing in a very James Bond-like tone of Tarzan being a pond hopping jungle enforcer while is just as comfortable in a suit and tie than he is swinging near-bare-ass through tropical foliage, our hero rocks up in Brazil on a commercial flight to answer a call for aid from a professor. It seems that a death obsessed Jaguar Cult has sprung back up lead by the steely visage of Barcuma and as he and his followers move from village to village, slaughtering some natives and enslaving others in order to work in diamond mines.
Tarzan accepts the mission, but while he retrieves his animal pals Cheeta and Baron the lion from a zoo, an agent for Barcuma murders the professor to make a misguided statement. But while we’re trying to figure out why Tarzan is not only suddenly totally cool with zoos in general (hasn’t he literally been beating up trappers since the 30s), but he has no qualms with his friends being kept in one, he’s off, charging headlong into adventure as he navigates the Bazilian jungle to track down his latest enemy… Or at least he would if the movie doesn’t suddenly shift focus to introduce shifty, cigar chewing boat captain Sam Bishop and his orphan ward Pepe and Tarzan enlists their squabbling aid to transport himself, Cheeta and Baron down the river.
This gives Barcuma plenty of time to set up a bunch of ambushes along the way, but apparently Tarzan seems to think that he has so much time on his hands, when he isn’t feeding Jaguar Cult members to aquatic carnivores, he gets Bishop and Pepe to swing by and pick up Dr. Ann Phillips from the ruins of an attacked village to help her deliver medicine to halt the advance of a plague.
Can Tarzan tick off his weirdly sizable to-do list quick enough to finally get around to ending the threat of the Jaguar Cult before the film ends?
While producer Sy Weintraub probably should be commended for how hard he tried to keep the Tarzan franchise swinging, it was becoming fairly apparent that the writing was on the wall. While nowadays, if a film series is showing signs of exhaustion, studios usually give it a few years off before trying to return with a fresher take (or at least you’d hope it would), but back in the sixties you’d run a franchise as deep into the ground as you could while there was at least a few more nickles to be had, but with Tarzan And The Great River, you can tell that the formula is all but exhausted. The main problem seems to be, beyond the continuing desire to send Tarzan into the jungles of other countries (which all end up looking the same anyway), Mike Henry’s movies had absolutely no idea what to do with their musclebound hero behind him trying to remain a domineering physical presence while the film keeps insisting on focusing on other things. It all starts promisingly enough with the lord of the apes striding into frame wearing a sharp suit that’s snappier than any crocodile he’s ever had to fight and he’s even given a mission in true James Bond style as he’s asked to take out a killer cult that’s tearing a bloody swathe through other natives of the region.
If we were still in the later part of the Gordon Scott era, we’d have no doubt been gifted a hard-boiled adventure flick that would have seen Tarzan engage this cult all on his own and gradually wear them down before engaging in the barbaric leader in a brutal fight to the death which might have been the sixties equivalent of the final thirty minutes of Predator. However, those days were resolutely over and the productions didn’t exactly have time to craft Hitchcockian cat and mouse games to really ratchet up the tension. As a result, even though the movie builds up Barcuma and his Jaguar Cult as a major threat (the score dramatically goes “duh duh DUH” literally every time one of them comes on screen – which is a lot) and we see numerous times how vicious his lust for power is, the film seems reluctant to actually have Tarzan do anything about it until ten minutes from the end of the film.
Granted, that last ten minutes has Tarzan beating the crap out of each other as their fight takes them all over an admittedly impressive set, but until then we get to THRILL as Tarzan looks on as large chunks of the run time are dedicated to Bishop and Pepe indulging in Indiana Jones/Short Round style banter and GASP as Tarzan also looks on while Diana Millay’s rather unnecessary doctor character complains a lot about vaccines. Around about halfway through the film, you actually start to feel sorry for Henry, because not only does he not have much else to to other than mumble snatches of wisdom and look powerful while running, but this was the film that saw the actor bit in the face by the chimp playing Cheeta which required 20 stitches in the jaw. Anyone wondering why this film has a Cheeta that doesn’t have much screentime can probably draw their own depressing conclusions as to why that is…
Not all of Tarzan And The Great River is carried away in a tide of mismanaged characters – the Bishop/Pepe plot thread may not be what you tuned into this movie for, but it’s handled quite well, especially considering how inadvertently creepy their relationship could have been if handled wrong. Elsewhere, that final brouhaha between the sweaty hero and villain does turn out to be the quintessential Tarzan climactic fight scene as both men swing for the fences with wild, Adam West style roundhouses as their captive audience blankly look on; but much like a lot of other movies from this time period, The Great River is yet another movie where anyone who isn’t white is either a relentless savage or a humble victim.
More a PSA for the importance of taking vaccines than the epic, Bondian blowout the opening twenty minutes suggest, Tarzan And The Great River is yet again another movie featuring Burroughs’ legendary hero that plays much better if you’ve never seen a Tarzan movie before. However, for the rest of us, a lack of original ideas and an unwillingness to go darker means that the jungle Lord’s twenty-seventh official adventure feels more like it’s sent its chiseled hero down the river.
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