After Lex Barker the male model, producer Sol Lesser decided to try a body builder, Gordon Scott, as Tarzan. Scott looks a bit more of a jungle wild man than Barker - though he’s not as genuinely strange as Johnny Weismuller.
The plot is a bit tired – unscrupulous hunters looking for ivory, lost kingdom, nice doctor, etc. For one exciting moment we are led to believe that Tarzan is going to have a romance - Vera Miles plays a nurse who goes for a nude swim, and later on Tarzan playfully throws her in the water. After sixteen films of Tarzan being married it’s good to see him in flirt mode again... but nothing more is made of this. She goes off with the doctor (Peter Van Eyck). Disappointing!
At one stage of the film the baddie ivory hunters pretend to be documentary filmmakers. Filmmakers and Tarzan would have been a fun plot - but that's not taken up here either.
It's a dull Tarzan entry, for completists only. Jack Elam plays a baddie, without a beard, and there's a decent sequence where some people get thrown into a pit of lions. This was the last Tarzan made at RKO.
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