After ditifully wearing Tarzan’s all purpose loin cloth for an impressive twelve movies, it eventually became time for Johnny Weissmuller to catch the next vine out of town and hand over the mantle after sixteen years of dutiful service. He left behind him Brenda Joyce’s second incarnation of Jane, the increasingly annoying Boy and many back breaking instances of rubber gator wrestling that just simply looked exhausting. It goes without saying that whomever would follow in his manly footsteps would have pretty big shoes to fill (assuming they’d be wearing shoes at all), but once Weissmuller yodelled his last cry, it was time for the more conventional movie star looks of Lex Barker to swoop in and take over.
Would this influx of new blood manage go over with crowds used to seeing Weissmuller in the role fairly regularly (twelve times in sixteen years is Hugh Jackman/Wolverine numbers by anyone’s reckoning), or would the face change cause a fumble in the jungle?
With all things being equal, it’s another idyllic day in the jungle as Tarzan alternates between rescuing cute animals from snarling predators and doting over his wife as they frolic in the river. Elsewhere, Cheeta is typically exercising her own brand of mischievous chaos, but as she does so, she discovers an old plane crash and after toying with the skeletal corpse slumped in the pilot’s seat (naturally), she retrieves evidence proving that an aviator named Gloria James who went missing twenty years earlier could still be alive. Dutifully handing it over to Tarzan and Jane who send it back to the States, it soon becomes apparent that there’s a man facing life imprisonment if James isn’t found to give vital testimony – however, ever the keeper of epic secrets, Tarzan reveals he knows where the missing aviator actually is.
It turns out that James has been living with a hidden tribe in secret kingdom known as the Blue Valley that nobody except Tarzan can find, but the real kicker is that the reason these people are so protective of their secret city is that it holds the legendary fountain of youth which has kept James young and spry during her double decade of living with these people. But while she agrees to leave in order to free her friend despite the fact it’ll cause to revert back to her actual age (surely a fate worse than death in the late 40s), some of the natives start to get squirrelly that so many people now know the location of their exclusive nirvana and plot to kill Tarzan in an act of supreme localism.
After having her beau, Jessop, released, James returns with him to Africa in the hope that both of them can go to the Blue Valley to live out the rest of their days, but Tarzan, now realising that this revolving door policy these people have selfishly imposed on the untouched Blue Valley will no doubt lead to eventually ruin. However, a ill-timed domestic with the missus means that even more people catch on to the existence of the youth-giving waters.
The main focus of Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (although technically the titular water feature isn’t actually his) is unsurprisingly how well Lex Barker manages to install himself in the centre of a machine that had already been running for over ten years and it’s practically impossible not to compare the new with the old. The movie does what it can to piledrive the notion that Barker is Tarzan in multiple ways what with a spirited Ungawa being his first uttered word and Brenda Joyce’s Jane being carried over from the Weissmuller era to make the transition smoother. However, you can’t help but feel that maybe Barker might have been better served by being allowed to do a little more than just strictly follow in his predecessors footsteps. Boy may have been jettisoned (thank God), but Barker still speaks in Weissmuller’s broken English and continues with Tarzan’s rather surly nature as he unleashes the full force of his Hollywood good looks on the screen. However, while he’s absolutely fine whenever he’s required to swing, swim, fight and basically look dashing despite the fact that his Tarzan weirdly now inexplicably wears little slippers, he’s a little bit too good looking for a man raised in the jungle when compared to the more sloping brow and meaner eyes of his slightly more feral looking forbearer.
Still, while Barker is a serviceable replacement, the real good news is that his fledgling outing is a solid Tarzan adventure that may not break the mold or strive to be particularly innovative, but it delivers a nicely complex plot that piles on numerous characters that all do whatever they can to piss Tarzan off in a myriad of different ways.
Yes, the entire plot is once again basically “everything goes to shit because no one listens to Tarzan” and it certainly isn’t the first time we’ve dealt with a lost city or people willing to plunder it, but it’s the subtraction of a lot of the more annoying aspects that keeps Tarzan’s Magic Fountain flowing. I really can’t put into words enough how much the ommission of Boy helps matters, because no disrespect to Johnny Sheffield (who went on to star in his own series, Bomba The Jungle Boy), but the lord of the ape’s kid sidekick was getting so annoying I was starting to root for any wildlife that was trying to eat him. As a result, Jane’s continued insistence on causing a marital spat everytime posh white folks come to stay and Cheeta’s vaguely sinister capering become much easier to bear and gives Barker more opportunity to settle into the role without a blonde, curly-haired plot device constantly getting underfoot.
The rest of the story sees all the other characters thrown into a washing machine of story that sees everyone circling round each other. Jessop (played by Universal Monsters regular Evelyn Ankers) simply wants to free her man friend and then return to Blue Valley with him to life out the rest of her extended life despite strict rules blatently stating she can’t (didn’t she listen for the twenty years she stayed there?); an overzealous guard believes that the only way to protect his people’s secret is to murder everyone he comes across and a couple of shifty types tag along to make their fortunes after figuring it all out because “there isn’t a woman anywhere in the world that wouldn’t pay any price to remain young”. Once again, it’s down to Tarzan sort out each and every one of these vapid people (including his own wife) and restore equilibrium to anyone who hasn’t already been fatally shot with a flaming arrow. Like most Tarzan films, it’s hardly stacked with originality, but all the individual parts do their job well enough to ensure that Lex’s debut is solid enough.
While the first film of Barker’s reign is hardly super memorable, it still lives up to the Tarzan rule of thumb that if you’ve never seen a Tarzan movie before, it plays out perfectly fine, giving you all the adventure and jungle-based marital strife you had already come to expect from Weissmuller’s tenure. Maybe as Barker progressed, his entries became bolder, but as it stands, his standing in stands firm.
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