Tarzan the Fearless is a serial starring superhero Buster Crabbe. Despite the charm of Crabbe and the beauty of his blonde co-star the movie is a bit listless in places. That's doubtless because it's a cobbled together flick from the full 12-chapter serial which seems to be a lost movie. There's likely little a seasoned watcher cannot gather from the pieces remaining, but the movie is filled with odd moments.
In this one Tarzan helps an old scientist who is researching the lost people of Zar. He gets kidnapped by them just as his daughter and her boyfriend and two villains show up to see him. Tarzan gets mixed up with them mostly attracted by the lovely woman who likes to swim with crocodiles. There are several moments of confusion and some lion fighting, but it all comes eventually down to rescuing the father and the girl rejecting her trusting boyfriend (poor guy really gets screwed in this story) and she stays with Tarzan and her father. Crabbe hardly speaks, but his charm shines through as well as his sculpted body since he's hardly wearing anything at all.
This one has most of the tropes you'd expect in a Tarzan flicker, and Crabbe makes a decent looking Tarzan. He captures a naive excitement about the world that is intriguing.
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I always found it curious that Tarzan was clean-shaven and short-haired in all his old movies (and the novels). Surely he'd have had a beard and long hair? Or did his ape parents teach him to shave and cut his luxuriant locks? The world needs to know the answer to this perplexing puzzle.
ReplyDeleteERB explains it by having Tarzan see clean-shaven men in his father's books and later when he begins to grow a beard he emulates those images and uses his Dad's knife to scrape it off. I suppose the hair is the same but in the comics it never seems to grow beyond a certain acceptable length. The movies which eschew the Greystoke legacy don't offer up any answers to these essential mysteries.
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