Gordon Scott plays Tarzan in his fourth appearance as the jungle man created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Anthony Quayle is the villain Slade, a cold-blooded hunter and tracker leading a group of mercenaries to a hidden diamond mine in the jungle. Tarzan takes up Slade’s trail after the latter kills innocent villagers while stealing dynamite from a village depot. Sara Shane costars as a jet-setting model and pilot who crashes her plane in the wilderness and is taken along the journey by Tarzan, and Sean Connery is one of the criminals, part of a greedy, cutthroat group that turns on each other as Tarzan tracks them up the river. The Tarzan films had been low-budget B-movies for a couple of decades, but Sy Weintraub, who made his debut as a producer with this 1959 film, gave this production a more impressive budget, a solid supporting cast, and a grittier sensibility to appeal to more adult audiences. Where Scott previously played the character in a simple-speaking mode in the Johnny Weismuller tradition, he's more articulate here, which is closer to the original creation in the novels, and the violence has a harder edge as one character after another dies a gruesome (if non-explicit) death and Tarzan himself suffers major injuries. Director John Guillermin went on to helm such prestigious productions as The Blue Max and The Towering Inferno. While not a major film, this is one of the superior productions in the long-running series and one of the best since Weismuller left the franchise. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)
Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure
Warner, 87 min., not rated, Blu-ray: $21.99 Volume 34, Issue 2
Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure
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