Word: tarzans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Traditionally, spring marks the dog days of the movie business. This year, though, Hollywood is sending up a happy howl over a quartet of surprise hits: Disney's man-meets-mermaid comedy Splash ($37.5 million in 31 days); Warners' tony Tarzan epic Greystoke ($14.8 million in ten days); Fox's distaff Raiders rip-off'Romancing the Stone (5/2.5 million in ten days); and a rowdy ensemble farce, Police Academy (an astonishing $30 million in its first 17 days). Herewith, reports on three new contenders and the reigning champ...
GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES Directed by Hugh Hudson Screenplay by P.H. Vazak and Michael Austin
Grab a vine, give a yell and prepare to take a leap of faith: they have gone and made an utterly serious Tarzan movie and, believe it or not, it is rather good. Indeed, much of Greystoke is very good, a tender, thoughtful and pictorially beautiful working out of the themes that were implicit in Edgar Rice Burroughs' original conception, but which over 70 years of life in the Hollywood jungle have been choked off by the riotous, unchecked growth of weedy invention and seedy, B-picture convention...
...relief as well. All of that was admittedly fun, as if the cast of a suburban sitcom had been dropped down in the African hinterlands, told to undress and act natural. But Burroughs, that dauntlessly prolific pop fictioneer, had something more important on his mind when he dreamed up Tarzan: nothing less than the creation of a mythic figure who would encapsulate the Edwardian age's anguish over the way the virtues of the primitive life were being trampled by the irresistible march of industrialism and imperialism. It is this figure that Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire...
...symbol, Tarzan (played lithely but never blithely by Christopher Lambert) requires little decoding. Born the seventh Earl of Greystoke to parents shipwrecked on the African coast, orphaned in infancy and raised by an extended family of apes, he is rescued and restored to his patrimony by a passing explorer (Ian Holm, who symbolizes humanity at its best). Unfortunately, he fits as uneasily into English society as he did into simian society, despite the loving fuss made over him by his grandfather (the late Ralph Richardson in all his glorious eccentricity). The old man's death, when he attempts...