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Further Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan the Magnificent

Further Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan the Magnificent

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Tarzan the Magnificent Warner Archive DVD coverThe Warner Bros. Archive Collection has taken good care of Tarzan fans. This manufacture-on-demand division of Warner Home Video offers all the films from the lesser-known Tarzan actors who followed Johnny Weissmuller in swinging from the jungle ceiling: Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney, Mike Henry, and the two seasons of the Ron Ely television story. The best of the lot for a more casual viewer is Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959), but Tarzan the Magnificent from 1960 comes a close second to it. It’s not as lean and stripped-down as its predecessor, and director Robert Day lacks the same skill at pacing an action picture as John Guillermin, but the movie ranks among the top live-action Tarzan films ever made. And it’s just a darn good adventure film in general, with some surprising levels of violence and mature subtexts.

(Tarzan disambiguation notice: The movie has no connection to the Burroughs book of the same title published in 1939 that combines two separate novellas.)

Tarzan the Magnificent is the second movie of the series from producer Sy Weintraub, who created the “New Look” Tarzan that took the character back to his more adult and violent Edgar Rice Burroughs roots. Best of all, Tarzan got his full vocabulary returned to him, breaking over two decades of film tradition that ruled the Lord of the Jungle had to horribly misuse pronouns and exterminate helping verbs.

Weintraub’s “New Look” favored crime stories set in the African rainforest, which gave them a harsh and naturalistic feel. They also borrowed elements from the Western, and Tarzan the Magnificent is the most explicit example. The movie opens with a band of outlaws, an archetypal blood clan of murderous brothers under an obsessed patriarch, committing a hold-up in broad daylight. The criminals rob the pay office of a mining company in a small town, passing “Wanted” posters of themselves on the way in. Except for the African locals walking the dusty street, this might be any frontier town in a Western of the day. With veteran John Ford stock-company actor John Carradine in the role of the clan head, Abel Banton, it’s hardly much of a leap to see this taking place in a lawless American frontier town. Even the name “Banton” has a Western ring to it, echoing the Clantons from the story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

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Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 1: The Movie

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 1: The Movie

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Tarzan Valley of Gold MOD DVDTarzan and the Valley of Gold wastes no time telling viewers of the mid-1960s that this was not going to be their grandfather’s Tarzan. Or their father’s either. With swinging ‘60s big band jazz backed with bongos playing over a Warholian montage of pop art colors projecting scenes from the movie, it’s impossible not to think JAMES BOND! JAMES BOND! from the moment the opening titles start.

No doubt that was producer Sy Weintraub’s intention with this 1966 outing for Tarzan, the first of a trio starring Mike Henry. The credits sequence is a dead-on imitation of the style of Maurice Binder for Dr. No. After the director’s credit fades, the film hops into a Goldfinger-inspired sweep over a tropical resort city, concluding on a helicopter taking off from a luxury yacht in the harbor. Then, in another scene swiped from Dr. No, assassins shoot a limo driver outside the airport, and an imposter chauffeur awaits the arrival of our handsome hero in his impeccable suit and tie. Cue city montage with more swingin’ Latin big band rhythms! Smash into an action scene where a sunglass-wearing sniper tries to pick off our sharply dressed hero in an empty bullring. The crafty Ape Man turns the tables on the gunman and kills him by dropping a giant Coke Bottle advertising prop onto him. Ah, good times.

Sy Weintraub shows with this opening that he has taken the “New Look” Tarzan he introduced in 1959 in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure one step further to imitate the stratospheric popularity of spy cinema of the decade. Tarzan not only speaks in complete sentences, but he is comfortable donning civilization’s trappings to travel the world to bring savage ape justice to turtleneck-wearing supervillains who adore exploding watches.

The temptation to go this direction must have been hard to resist: by the start of 1966, Bond-mania was approaching its delirious apex; Thunderball came out in December 1965 and was on its way to becoming one of the highest-grossing movies in history. Bandwagon films are often poor quality imitations, but Sy Weintraub already had a famous character available who could cut a dashing a dangerous figure to put at the center of his attempt to grab some Bond cash. It turned out well, better than you might initially think a “Tarzan goes ’60s spy” film would. Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, currently available as a manufacture-on-demand DVD from Warner Archive, lacks the excellent script, performances, and drama of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, but it delivers in the breezy fun department.

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Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

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White Buffalo One SheetWarner Archive has so far received all the attention in my recent veer into the world of the manufacture-on-demand DVD, a dazzling universe where the big studios serve the niche movie lovers with titles that would otherwise only surface in North America on bootlegs swiped off Japanese laserdiscs. (Yeah, you own a couple of those.) Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, The Bermuda Depths, and The Last Dinosaur all come from Warner Brothers’ MOD division. But two other studios have their own extensive MOD programs: MGM Limited Edition Collection and Universal Vault. It’s through MGM that we get the strange 1977 combo of Western and monster movie called The White Buffalo.

My first experience with The White Buffalo, aside from seeing ads on local television stations when it ran during “Charles Bronson Tough Guy Week,” was on an awful first-generation VHS tape I watched during college as part of an independent study of the 1970s Western. The movie was drab and a cruel disappointment considering how exciting the plot description sounded: “Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse team up to hunt down a giant, possibly supernatural, white buffalo on a rampage.” How could such a crunchy high-concept result in such a bland film?

Blame “VHS goggles,” which turned the movie’s photography into mulch. The difference in The White Buffalo experience between VHS and DVD is substantial. Although the MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD is rough compared to today’s Blu-rays, it is about as good as the picture could look in standard definition without undergoing hefty restoration. The movie isn’t a lost classic, but it wins in the realm of atmosphere: eerie and bleak. The artifice of the limited budget, which puts most of the nighttime and snowbound scenes against the Buffalo on obvious interior sets, contributes to the dream-like atmosphere. That may be an accident of filming, but it’s a positive creative accident. The White Buffalo never succeeds as an action thriller, but it remains a fascinating piece of odd Western cinema of the 1970s, a decade filled with plenty of oddness for the grand ol’ American genre. The current popularity of the Weird Western and steampunk subgenres gives the movie a freshness that moves it beyond being only a “Manifest Destiny” take on Jaws.

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Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure on DVD from Warner Archive

Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure on DVD from Warner Archive

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tarzans-greatest-adventure-posterI’ve discovered a way to merge my recent posts about the manufacture-on-demand DVDs of The Bermuda Depths and The Last Dinosaur with my long-running Edgar Rice Burroughs posts. Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, the 1959 live-action film now available from Warner Archive, also gives me a reason to go back to talking about Tarzan for the first time since I reviewed Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”.

Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan in twelve movies from 1932 to 1948. But Weissmuller’s departure from the role didn’t bring a halt to the series. It soldiered on, switching around studios and distributors (it had already flipped from MGM to RKO during Weissmuller’s tenure) for two more decades. Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney, and Mike Henry all played the Lord of the Jungle for at least two films each, and then the movies segued into the television series starring Ron Ely, who would later play another famous pulp hero in George Pal’s unfortunate Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze in 1975.

Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure arrived in the middle of this second stage of the jungle adventures and marked a major shift in style. Producer Sol Lesser left the series, and his replacement Sy Weintraub decided to revamp Tarzan with a “New Look.” Actually, it was more of an “Old Look”: Weintraub took Tarzan back to his literary roots and made a movie more faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book series. Tarzan suddenly gained a full mastery of the English language, and the story acquired a more adult tone.

Because of Weissmuller’s continued domination of the Tarzan-on-film image to this day — even the mighty Disney machine cannot overcome him — it’s hard to imagine the latter-day movies in the series as being any good. But Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure is excellent; it’s the ERB-fan’s Tarzan film. Not that I don’t love Weissmuller’s first two movies, but this is actually something pretty damn special for any Burroughs bibliophile. Even if it isn’t based on a specific novel, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure ranks with last year’s John Carter of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot as a movie that honestly captures the style and feel of ERB’s work. Had he been alive to see it, Burroughs would definitely have approved of the film. He might have objected to Tarzan’s non-monogamy, if it can really be called that, since Jane’s existence is questionable at this point in the movie series.

Also: a pre-007 Sean Connery as one of the villains. And it was actually shot in Africa!

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The Last Dinosaur Chomps Your Nostalgia on Warner Archive DVD

The Last Dinosaur Chomps Your Nostalgia on Warner Archive DVD

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Last Dinosaur Warner Archive DVDIt follows that if I write about The Bermuda Depths and its manufacture-on-demand DVD release, I must also write about its sister film, the dinosaur-hunting marvel of a Saturday afternoon dreamland, 1977’s The Last Dinosaur — also available on MOD DVD from Warner Archive. “Richard Boone vs. a T. Rex in a Primeval World.” You don’t need a large marketing team to work on your movie if you have a tagline like that.

The Last Dinosaur is a 1950s giant monster movie filmed in the 1970s and filtered through the visual effects style of 1960s Japanese special effects (tokusatsu) films. If that sentence gives you a frisson of joy, then the movie won’t disappoint. And The Last Dinosaur is a touch better than that description suggests, with a solid script and an excellent main character who can carry the outrageousness of a giant monster movie and make it seem like Moby Dick.

Touring around the ‘net looking for reviews of The Last Dinosaur will mostly unearth “bad movie snark” having a laugh over its economical special effects. You won’t find much of that here: I think The Last Dinosaur is a top-shelf B-budgeted “lost world” film that delivers all it should, occasional chuckles and groans included. Make all the sly comments you want about the “man-in-suit” monster effects — and there are some amusing moments — they still offer far more creativity and fun than most CGI-driven contemporary movies. Compare The Last Dinosaur to anything from SyFy and you’ll see the talent we lost when the Machines won the war.

Shot in Japan at the same time Amicus Productions in the U.K. was making their Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations (The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core, The People That Time Forgot), The Last Dinosaur sports a similar style that captures the spirit of ERB within a contemporary setting. It’s the best Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation not actually based on one of his novels; if Burroughs were alive and writing in the 1970s, he might have written something just like this.

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Childhood Resurfaced: The Bermuda Depths on DVD

Childhood Resurfaced: The Bermuda Depths on DVD

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Bermuda Depths posterThe rise of Manufacture-on-Demand (MOD) DVDs from major studios has at last permitted numerous obscure and second-tier features to reach the trembling hands of collectors. Movies that a small coterie of fans despaired would only be available on bootlegs are now only one-click shopping away on a DVD-R. MOD eliminates the need for “demand” and “profitability” that once stood between the collector and a decent legal copy of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.

Apologies to that great Burt Reynolds Western, it’s The Bermuda Depths that best exemplifies the MOD movie and gives a reason for the format to exist: a work unknown to most, but holding in the minds of a few the status of a childhood Holy Grail. And now the Warner Archive Collection, the MOD branch of Warner Home Video, has made available the first and only romantic tropical ghost story with a giant turtle.

Released in 1978, The Bermuda Depths is a quintessential “Did I Dream It?” nostalgia pic. All of us can recall some movie from our elementary school days — glanced late nights on television, on a slow Sunday afternoon, or rented on a blurry Betamax tape — that captivated our imagination in a fuzzy way. It left fleeting, haunting impressions, so that ten years or more afterwards, it feels that maybe the movie never existed at all and we made it up from the flotsam of other childhood ephemera. We wander through life occasionally asking others if they recall “that film where…”, and then getting uncomprehending slow blinks in response, followed by:

“You made that up.”

“No, I swear I didn’t. I mean … I don’t think so. It was this film with a ghost girl on a beach, and she had glowing eyes, and then there was this gigantic turtle that knocked over a boat…”

“It must be a Gamera film.”

“No, no! I saw a lot of Gamera films. Yeah, I can’t tell them apart, but I know this wasn’t a Gamera film.”

“You’ve just got a Gamera film crossed with something else. Look, eat your yougurt and take your pills. I’ll call the doctor.”

No, you were not crazy. This is a case where the memorial reconstruction dredged up from the back of the old junk drawer is exactly right. The Bermuda Depths is indeed “That movie that took place on a tropical beach with this beautiful woman who might have been a ghost and had glowing eyes and there was also this giant turtle that had something to do with it.” That rambling sentence is a spot-on description of the plot and experience of this movie.

It exists. And, unfortunate to report, it isn’t as exciting to revisit as its description might indicate.

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