A new Tarzan – Jock Mahoney – and a new location – India. Tarzan is visiting to help out an old mate, an Indian ruler on whose land they are building a dam; this means a bunch of elephants are at risk of being killed and it’s up to Tarzan to save the day. The baddie is an engineer who also built a dam in Africa that killed elephants.
Mahoney was a former stuntman with extensive acting experience; he’s in good shape and is an excellent fighter, but he was over 40 when he took the role. In it’s way this is interesting, to have an elder Tarzan (though little is made of this).
It takes a while to get used to Tarzan running around India in his loincloth, but the Indian locations are one of the most attractive features of this film. There’s a lot of elephant action – the early Weismuller films were very elephant-heavy, but then the animal became less prevalent in Tarzan movies, usually reduced to just a rampaging cameo at the end. So it’s nice to see a bit of time devoted to elephants.
The story is a little wonky. First of all, it doesn’t feel quite right that Tarzan is mucking about in someone else’s patch, even when invited. Secondly, the whole saving-elephants-from-a-flooding-plain angle seems a bit too contrived; it’s a potentially interesting topic – the benefits of the dam vs the destruction caused by it – but they have to twist things in order to make the plot more exciting, eg by bringing in nasty engineers, and having crappy reasons why the elephants can’t be rescued. Also Tarzan is more effective when working on the outskirts of civilisation. Finally, it’s a mistake to knock off the best villain with thirty minutes still to do.
But sheer spectacle of it all, the terrific elephants, plus Mahoney’s impressive debut puts this over the line.
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