Why do movies make a monkey out of Tarzan?
I HAVE yet to see any accurate film depiction of Tarzan Of The Apes. The latest celluloid attempt to beguile an audience by depicting Tarzan as a ‘vine-swinging hero’ asserts yet again the ‘poetic licence’ inflicted on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan, in fact, swung through trees like an ape. He didn’t spend time seeking a convenient vine or he wouldn’t have made it beyond the age of ten. No actor can emulate Tarzan’s natural squirrel-like method of travelling through the jungle, but I would have thought that with today’s technology it wouldn’t be a problem. After 99 years and countless films, perhaps Hollywood doesn’t want to destroy the myth it created. As for Johnny Weissmuller’s well-known ‘Tarzan cry’, I imagine this was meant to interpret the victory cry of a bull ape on making a kill. It was something Burroughs’s Tarzan only ever performed over any beast or man he’d killed in combat. Before he came across spears and bows, his favourite weapon was a rope woven from grass and used as a lasso. When he came across his dead father’s hunting knife, this weapon, combined with the lasso, propelled him to ‘king of the jungle’ status. His son, Jack, preferred a simple Enfield rifle. Several times, a disillusioned Tarzan turned his back on mankind, preferring the moral simplicity of nature. When he was tricked by German soldiers — who destroyed his African estate — into believing they’d also murdered his wife, he was content to devote the rest of his life to killing Germans. There was no ethical issue in this for him. For the record, Tarzan was ‘born’ in 1888 to Lord and Lady Greystoke, both of whom died at the hands of a great ape. But Rice Burroughs never recorded Tarzan’s death so, after 105 years, he lives on in the original books.
ANTHoNY F. lowE, west Bridgford, Notts.