by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I eventually watched a movie I’d recorded from
TCM last March but had only now discovered in my back files: Tarzan the Fearless, a production of Sol Lesser’s Principal Pictures
from 1933 — the year before Lesser’s company made The Return of
Chandu, the remarkable serial directed by
Ray Taylor, written by Barry Barringer and starring Bela Lugosi. Tarzan
the Fearless was the film for which Lesser
created the releasing strategy he also used in The Return of Chandu: he billed it as a so-called “feature-serial” and
offered it to exhibitors in three forms: as a straight-on 12-chapter serial; as
a feature-length (86 minutes) movie edited from the first four chapters plus
the remaining eight shown in serial form (with a special trailer shown at the
end of the feature to announce that the story would be continued as a serial at
the same theatre); or as just the feature without the serial appendages. He
produced it under an unusual rights deal he made with James Pierce, who had
been given the rights to a Tarzan story by the character’s creator, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, as a wedding present when Pierce married Burroughs’ daughter. Only
Pierce’s contract with Lesser stipulated that Pierce himself play Tarzan — and
Pierce was sufficiently heavy and out of shape that Lesser told him if he
played Tarzan, the only way the film would work was if he made it a spoof.
Fortunately, Lesser was able to buy Pierce off, giving him an additional
payment in exchange for relinquishing his contractual right to star, and since
MGM had just started Tarzan, the Ape Man starring 1928 Olympic swimming gold medalist Johnny Weissmuller, Lesser
signed the big 1932 Olympic swimming gold medalist, Larry “Buster” Crabbe — who
looks enviably hot in Tarzan’s leopard-skin loincloth (despite some shots in
which director Robert F. Hill and cinematographers Harry Neumann and Joseph
Bretherton got too close and showed bits of Crabbe’s modern and decidedly not jungle-made underwear under the loincloth) and quite
a bit handsomer than he did in Flash Gordon three years earlier (where he was still a nice hunk
of man-meat but he’d started to put on the pounds).
Lesser had to deal with
threatened litigation from MGM over his Tarzan project — Burroughs didn’t make
the lives of studio lawyers easier by licensing and cross-licensing the
character up the ying-yang until just about everyone holding a contract
allegedly authorizing them to do a Tarzan movie had to deal with the
uncertainty of just what they were and weren’t allowed to do with the character
— and finally Lesser agreed not to start making Tarzan the Fearless until MGM finished Tarzan, the Ape Man. As things turned out the MGM Tarzan (a project studio head Irving Thalberg green-lighted
just because he had a lot of location footage left over from MGM’s original
jungle epic, Trader Horn,
actually filmed in Africa, and he wanted to use that film for a sure-fire story
that would help make up for the studio’s losses on Trader Horn) was an enormous hit and Lesser’s trailed along in
its wake — while Burroughs, still seething at the treatment his famous
character had got from both sets
of filmmakers, greenlighted a project of his own called The New
Adventures of Tarzan, also as a
feature-serial, with yet another champion swimmer, Herman Brix, as his star.
(Alas, all that survives of The New Adventures of Tarzan is a cut-and-paste feature edited down from the
later episodes of the serial — and in a reissue print billing the star as Bruce
Bennett, a name Brix adopted in 1939 because he wanted to get away from his
ape-man roots and be considered for important roles in major-studio productions
— which he finally got in late-1940’s films like Mildred Pierce and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)
Burroughs was particularly upset that his Tarzan had been completely fluent in English, French
and several African languages, while Weissmuller had little more to say than
“Me Tarzan — you Jane,” and Crabbe got even less than that (though anyone who’s
seen a Crabbe movie in which he did
have dialogue to deliver probably doesn’t miss the experience that much with
this one). Of course, the MGM version totally outclassed this one, both
critically and at the box office; as Harrison’s Reports, a trade paper for theatre owners, commented at the
time, “This is another version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan stories, and
will do for juvenile trade; it might prove tiresome to adult audiences who have
seen the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer version made last year.” Seen today, Tarzan
the Fearless is pretty tiresome; though the opening credits make a
big deal of the (dubious) claim that Burroughs wrote the story especially for
the film, it’s the usual mishmash of a Tarzan tale (whether by Burroughs or
others — the writing credits of this one list William Lord Wright as “script
supervisor,” Walter Anthony as “dialogue editor,” and Basil Dickey and future
serial specialist George H. Plympton for “continuity”): lots of native fauna to
menace the whites in the jungle (lions, crocodiles, elephants et al.), lots of skullduggery and people at cross purposes
— some of the villains are Arabs in full Valentino-as-the-Sheik headdresses and
robes, some of them are whites and are part of the heroine’s entourage — as
well as a lost city, a hidden treasure and a search for the heroine’s missing
father, Dr. Brooks (E. Alyn Warren), who’s described in the American
Film Institute Catalog synopsis as “a
scientist studying African races and religions” — which is not made all that
clear in the film itself.
In fact, a lot of things aren’t made clear in the film itself; it opens pretty much in
medias res with heroine Mary Brooks
(Jacqueline Wells, later Julie Bishop, and also the female lead in the marvelous
1934 Karloff-Lugosi vehicle The Black Cat) deciding to go skinny-dipping in a jungle lagoon — only she’s
attacked by a bunch of stock-footage crocs (director Hill’s editing is actually
pretty good but the graininess of the old footage gives the game away) and
Tarzan leaps into the water and rescues her. Mary is leading an expedition
through the jungle of Uganda (a stray line of dialogue tells us, for once in a
Tarzan movie, which part of
Africa we’re supposed to be in) to find her dad, and she’s brought along a
nerdy boyfriend named Bob Hall (Eddie Woods) and a guide named Jeff Herbert
(Philo McCullough), whom she trusts despite the fact that the moment we see him
he’s so swarthy, heavy-set and unkempt, except for his neatly trimmed “roo”
moustache, we know he’s up to no
good. Of course we’re right: Jeff not only steals one of the sacred emeralds
from the local temple (it’s one of these stories that, like King Kong, describes a Third World community living on the
ruins of a village they couldn’t have built themselves but they’ve nonetheless
carefully preserved from the long-extinct tribe that did) but he’s also
carrying a letter — we see a sliver of it at intervals throughout the movie but
only towards the end do we get to see enough of it to explain its significance
— offering him $10,000 if he can verify the rumor that Tarzan is dead. Jeff is
enough of a mean no-goodnick that he’s not going to let a little thing like
Tarzan not being dead stand in
the way of the $10,000; if he must, he’ll kill Tarzan himself and also make
lascivious demands and force himself on Mary. The letter, when we get to see
all of it, mentions that Tarzan is the long-lost heir to the Greyfriar (not Greystoke!) fortune in Britain, and the people
currently enjoying that money want to make sure that no rival claimant is
around to take it away from them.
There are lots of scenes of Tarzan wrestling
lions with a knife in his hand (which was what he was doing when most Americans
first saw him — on the cover of Munsey’s All-Story in 1912, when his first adventure was published and
Frank Munsey’s illustrator showed him that way), swimming through the water
either for his own enjoyment or to save another of the white characters (well,
the person playing him was a
champion swimmer, after all!), and — about the only comic relief in the film —
playing a portable phonograph that scares the life out of him at first but
which he eventually gets used to (I suspect the writing committee were inspired
by the famous scene of Nanook trying to eat a phonograph record in Robert
Flaherty’s 1922 classic Nanook of the North), and the ending shows some of Tarzan’s animal
friends dancing to the music played by the phonograph — an irritating piece of
camp that no doubt alienated many 1933 viewers even though at this level the
scene is quite charming. The basic problem with Tarzan the Fearless — well, there are a lot of basic problems: the film is too slow-moving to
generate much excitement, the action scenes are ineptly staged, director Hill
deploys the cheesiest and most hackneyed recordings from Abe Meyer’s musical
library (as opposed to Return of Chandu director Taylor, who raided Meyer’s music box for its subtlest and
most sophisticated cues) and the plot is not just nonsense but actively antithetical
to the idea of sense, so much so that it
might actually have been better watching this as a serial because at least then
we would have got the chapter fore-caps explaining who was who, what side they
were on (it’s pretty much Tarzan, Bob, Mary and her dad against everyone else,
actually) and how the various incidents are supposed to fit together.
