Review of Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) by Bill K — 10 May 2009

Somewhat fun, but generally tedious. Jane seems to be a "modern" woman who, when unleashed upon the dark continent, decides to run wild-- or at least to run off with the first chimp-raised light-skinned wild man she meets.

Their encounter makes the transition from apparent rape attempt to seduction to willing flirtation to, at last, jungle monogamous partnership, all with a kind of baffling and uncommunicated set of rationales (sexual or otherwise) that Jane's poorly developed character fails to really communicate to us.

The film's lack of concern over Tarzan's origins is very interesting-- its energies seem split instead between the sexuality of Jane (which sometimes means Jane-as-sexual-property) and the struggle between the civil Europeans and the relentlessly savage forces of Africa-- carnivores and pygmies, in particular.

Tarzan rallies his more civilized herbivorous animal friends to fend off Africa's dangerously bestial elements, to help secure the British their longed-for access to the elephant graveyard and its ivory, and to help ensure that his Jane is alive (and, conveniently, her father dead) to make the decision to shack up with him in a wide-branched tree somewhere at the story's end.

This all works much better as a kind of muted 1932 sexual fantasy of one kind or another than a work of successful narrative cinema.