Denny Of The Jungle!

In 1959 the mavens at MGM thought it a grand idea to remake Tarzan the Ape Man. Thanks to the sometimes, byzantine way the Edgar Rice Burroughs bartered the rights to his Jungle Lord, MGM had rights to the name but none of the actual material from the novels. That's one reason why we were saddled with an inarticulate Tarzan for decades, as much as ERB would bemoan that situation. So while the Ape Man was getting a modernizing in the hands of Sy Weintraub, MGM dusted off their part of the legacy and launched it again. Better that they hadn't really. It's rather terrible and quite silly. 

Denny Miller was cast as the mysterious Lord of the Jungle in this familiar tale of hunters seeking the Elephant's Graveyard. But he's not all that mysterious and the movie itself doesn't seem interested in building any fascination with what he might be this time out. Joanna Barnes is Jane and she's pretty enough but makes one ache for the dynamic performance of Maureen O'Sullivan a few decades earlier. While O'Sullivan's Jane was feisty, Barnes gives us a whiner who although she eventually seems maybe to fall in love with Tarzan isn't very convincing. Cesare Danova is okay as Holt the hunter, but Robert Douglas seems confused playing Jane's ill-fated father. 

The movie was designed to make the most of footage looted from King Solomon's Mines and alas that concern seems to have trumped the need for coherent storytelling. There is no mystery of a hidden plateau, and Tarzan seems to live right down the block, actually rather far from the center of the action. His home though is curious. He as an awesome tricked out treehouse with nary a mention how this splendid accommodation came to be, and it's situated in what I assume the producers imagine must have been and Eden of sorts in which wild animals live side by side. There's even a real live flamingo in his front yard. 

But the big hurt is Miller's hapless portrayal of Tarzan. Miller is stuck in two modes -- dumbstruck and confused. Even when he's on the attack he seems bemused. MGM also needed to give us some new action scenes, as the film relies much too heavily on plundered footage from its 1932 predecessor for the finale. If they wanted to remake the movie, they should've remade it and not just repackaged the old and better one. 

Rip Off