Tarzan of the Apes

Whenever I watch a silent film, I try to view it in the proper context (time it was made, technology, etc.). I got a kick out of this film. I imagined what wonder there was in viewing giraffes, rhinos, elephants, pythons, and a host of jungle life. I particularly enjoyed the young man who played Tarzan as a child. His face was continually full of wonder and life. For me, the movie took a downturn when Elmo Lincoln showed up. For a guy who obviously spent his time running through the jungle, climbing trees, wrestling critters ten times his size, he looked like one of the guys that used to sit next to my father at his favorite watering hole. He has that huge paunch and those fleshy white legs. I was very aware that this Tarzan was in continual danger of falling off a branch (possibly breaking it) and doing himself harm. Let's face it: he also wasn't exactly going to win any beauty contests. If Jane hadn't had a bad experience with he fiancé, would she have given him a second look. Jane, no great prize herself, gets together with him, but I couldn't help but wonder what they would be doing, other than the obvious. All that aside, it was fun seeing this. I had heard about the film for years and decided to purchase a copy for myself. It was worth it for the novelty.

...because of his already established reputation as a Hollywood strong man (e.g. his role as the Mighty Man of Valor in the 1916 DW Griffith classic "Intolerance").

Also, the image of Tarzan in 1918 was not that of a lithe gymnast like Christopher Lambert in "Greystoke", but of a man powerful enough to wrestle lions. Strength equalled bulk.

There's an interesting piece of trivia attached to that movie and Uganda (that's in East Africa) where I'm now based. There's a popular myth around here that the 1918 version of "Tarzan of the Apes" was filmed on the northern shores of Lake Victoria. In fact it was shot, I believe, in Louisiana.

After a shipboard mutiny forces Lord and Lady Greystoke into the uncharted African Jungle, Lady Greystoke gives birth to a boy. The parents die soon after, and the boy (Gordon Griffith) is raised by a family of "apes". He learns to live and fight like them, but also learns how to read and right from escaped slave Binns (George B. French), who heads back to Europe. Binns eventually convinces enough people that young Greystoke is still alive, and brings an expedition back to find him years later. The boy has now grown into the man known as Tarzan (Elmo Lincoln), Lord of the Jungle. When he sets eyes on Jane Porter (Enid Markey), it's love at first sight, and he rescues her from a number of perils. Also featuring Thomas Jefferson (!).

Filmed in Louisiana, this proved a hit, despite only adapting the first half of Burroughs' novel. A quick sequel, The Romance of Tarzan, was released later the same year but has since been lost. Lincoln, who had played a scary guard in Griffith's Intolerance, makes for an equally scary looking Tarzan, big and beefy, wearing a headband and an over-the-shoulder fur onesie. His Tarzan "yell" consists of him raising his fists in the air and making an insane face. The "apes" in Tarzan's family are people in weird monkey suits, with a real chimp thrown in occasionally to make things even weirder. There's also a really bad gorilla suit, as well as a real lion which one source I have says was actually killed by Lincoln on screen. There's enough strange stuff here to keep the viewer's interest, along with a brief (under an hour) running time.

At this early point in American film history, Tarzan of the Apes was an instant success. Elmo Lincoln was perhaps the best actor at the time for the role. It's a fairly straight forward telling of the novel, tho Edgar Rice Burroughs was frequently on the set in an advisory role and his input was seldom utilized. In the books, Tarzan was quite the self-made scholar and this was barely touched upon in the film. For 1918, this turned out to be an excellent film, parts of which still hold up today. It's a solid 7 out of 10, and well worth seeing.

Cinema's first adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's famous novel sees screen strongman Elmo Lincoln claiming a place in cinematic history in the title role. With his bulging eyes and crazed grin, he's a strangely unhinged version of the ape man, but Lincoln's eccentric portrayal somehow makes him all the more convincing. Although only a 60 minute version of the original 2-hour film survives, the plot remains both coherent and remarkably faithful to Burrough's famous novel, and the swamplands of Louisiana provide a convincing substitute for the African jungle.