As we start to reach the end of Lex Barker’s swing as the constantly bare chested jungle lord, it was starting to feel like all the original ideas had been well and truly spent. The endless regurgitating of vicious tribes, cold-blooded hunters and the odd discovery of a lost tribe was starting to get a little wearing and even the fact that Barker hadn’t managed to have an actress play Jane opposite him for more than once was starting to get frustratingly repetitive. However, despite going through more Janes than Spinal Tap went through drummers, there’s a damn good chance the impressively solid Tarzan’s Savage Fury may actually stand as Barker’s best effort.
I mean, you could hardly call Tarzan savage in this one and I wouldn’t go as far to call him furious either, but even though his penultimate appearance in the loin cloth hardly breaks new ground, as a good all rounder, it’s pretty much a healthy example of a classic Tarzan adventure. Hell, it even goes as far to embrace aspects of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original stories for a change – in fact, someone even goes as far as uttering the name “Greystoke”.
You know how it is. You manage to purge your franchise of one decidedly annoying child character only to replace him with a brand new one once you find the child being mistreated by being used as bait to lure crocodiles out of the deep waters. While I believe child’s services might have been a bit tough to contact back in the late 1800s/early 1900s, Tarzan takes it upon himself to take the child – whose name is Joey – in and venture back to his tree house to rejoin a Jane he hasn’t seen in days. On the way, he tries to teach an understandably apprehensive Joey about the ways of jungle chiefly by getting him to try and store down a lion or two, but while Tazan and his new sidekick make their way home, duplicitous forces move against them.
Those forces consist of great white hunter, Rokov and his snivelling partner, Edwards who have lured Oliver Greystoke into the jungle on an expedition only to shoot him in the back and feed his body to the lions. Why would they do such a thing? Because the late, lamented Oliver is/was Tarzan’s cousin and after doing the despicable deed, Rokov gets Edwards to masquerade as the dead relative to convince a none the wiser Tarzan to lead them to the fearsome Wazuri Tribe in order to harvest uncut diamonds. As always, Tarzan is more suspicious than a paranoid squirrel, but is convinced by Jane to lead them as they claim to also be British goverment agents who need the diamonds for national defence purposes.
Of course, commuting such devious acts in the jungle always ends up having nasty consequences and once Rokov makes a break for it with as many jewels as he can carry, it falls on the innocents left behind to pick up the tab…
If you were to be blunt, there is so little originality to be found in Tarzan’s Savage Fury you’d be forgiven for writing it off as the latest installment in a rapid fire series that’s long since run out of new ideas. In fact, it’s one of those installments that if you were to mention any over-familiar Tarzan trope, chances are this movie has it in some form or another – Tarzan brawling with a crocodile, Tarzan trying to regain the trust of an angered tribe, Jane getting easily bamboozled by crooks, white villains double crossing the shit out of one another; it’s all here and all very pre-used. However, sometimes it’s not the story that wins out but rather the manner in which it’s being told and director Cy Endfield (who went on to make Mysterious Island and Zulu) manages to take all these tired aspects – that even include a few the franchise has long since dumped – and mold them into a nicely solid offering.
In fact, the main proof that Endfield seems to know what he’s doing is that he brings back the hated notion of a child sidekick to the series and yet somehow doesn’t make it that you don’t want to gouge your own eyes out in frustration. The additional fact that little Joey (or Boy II as he might have well been called) has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot should be a major issue, quite simply because it starts to feel like a backslide into the days when the agitating antics of Johnny Sheffield’s original Boy would make every Tarzan movie at least 45% more annoying. However, the film remembers how Boy was originally introduced all those years before and in return desides to treat Tommy Carlton’s mistreated Joey as more of a surrogate son than a lazy storytelling tool to complicated plots. Spared from having it’s child actor act like a self-entitled brat in one of the most dangerous environments known to man, Tarzan’s Savage Fury gives Barker’s version of the ape man to follow Weissmuller into the realms of being a father figure, even if his lessons involve getting a small child to try and stare down lions to up his confidence.
Elsewhere, Barker’s revolving door of Jane actresses brings up Dorothy Hart who doesn’t do a bad job, but considering that she instantly was replaced by Joyce MacKenzie for the next installment means that you probably shouldn’t get too attached.
We also get an interesting selection of bad guys this time round as Charles Korvin’s murderous hunter cooks up a plan that seemingly seems incredibly personal by murdering one of Tarzan’s relatives and getting his snivelling partner to pretend to be him. Amusingly, however, Tarzan sees not to give a shit one way or the other, ranging from being deeply unimpressed by meeting his “cousin” to being even more nonplussed by discovering that it’s all a scam which resulted in the murder of a family member. However, while Tarzan seems to not give a jungle toss about his family, this is still one of the rare classic Tarzan entries that actually invokes material from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ source novels. In fact, there’s a whole sequence that sees an elderly member of the Wazuri Tribe actually remember the baby Greystoke and actually takes him to visit the makeshift wooden house his parents built before they died and Tarzan was adopted by apes.
It’s a small acknowledgement, but it manages to add some depth to an entry that, at an unusually long 82 minutes, actually gives the movie time to breathe between the action. Of course that doesn’t mean Endfield hasn’t remembered to add some classic movie-Tarzan stuff such as our hero vanquishing his foe by gorilla pressing him above his head and launching him off a cliff into a waiting pit of lions. Even Cheeta’s usual brand of deranged chaos gets a moment to shine and is even repeatedly used for good when the chimp first insists on stealing vital evidence from the bad guys and then graduates to bring down an entire plane on her own when she gets on a radio directs the pilots into a mountain. Fucking psycho.
Once again, we find ourself with a Tarzan movie that’s neither the best or worst that the sprawling franchise has to offer. However, while Lex Barker’s time in the loin cloth saw him unavoidably playing second fiddle to his predecessor, Tarzan’s Savage Fury emerges as one of the actor’s better swings.
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