Movie review – Tarzan #15 – “Tarzan’s Peril” (1951) **1/2

Finally, a Tarzan movie actually shot on location in Africa – MGM’s King Solomon’s Mines had raised the bar… though I understand that technical problems meant a great deal of it had to be reshot in the studio. Perhaps not coincidentally, this film offers the most sympathetic depiction of colonialism in a Tarzan film to date; a bit late in the day you’d think, but there you go.

The opening sequence has the tribes are farewelling a devoted colonial official who is leaving Africa (Alan Napier) – “you are our father and our uncle” says the Queen (Dorothy Dandridge!), without irony – and the colonial regime is, on the whole, portrayed as hard working and efficient.

The plot concerns a former slaver trader who escapes from prison; he’s called Radijeck, so maybe he’s meant to be a communist (he spends the rest of the film trying to sell guns to the natives and whip up trouble, so you could definitely read it that way).

Tarzan is a lot more American in this one and speaks longer sentences; he has a new Jane, an older one with short hair who seems like an Eisenhower era housewife. There’s a scene where she serves him dinner at the dinner table while he asks her something like “I hope you don’t get bored while I’m out all day” – Maureen O’Sullivan never would have stayed at home all day, she was out with Tarzan, having sex and trying to avoid being eaten by crocodiles.

The scenes among the villains are well done, helped by George Macready playing Radijeck; it’s also a good idea that Radijeck has a history with Tarzan and Jane but this is disappointingly undeveloped (apparently Radijeck was “nursed back to health” by Jane… is that code for he raped her or something?)

Byron Haskin directed, and you can feel him making an effort to raise this above the usual Barker Tarzan opus. And for a lot of the running time he succeeds: the action scenes are well done, the villains very strong; the only thing that really drags it down are the Tarzan-Jane scenes (actually all the Jane scenes) and some poorly-integrated cheetah action.