Tarzan the Ape Man

John Derek directs, photographs and, for most of its 115 minutes, gazes. Bo Derek stars and produces. The property is Edgar Rice Burroughs’s, by way of the 1932 MGM film that made Johnny Weissmuller a star, and the one real idea in Tom Rowe’s screenplay, with Gary Goddard also credited as writer, is to tell the story from Jane’s side and keep Tarzan at the edge of the frame. That is a fair idea. Jane is the one who travels, the one who chooses, the one with a father to argue with. Having moved her to the centre, though, the film cannot think of anything for her to do there except take her clothes off and get into the water.

Derek shoots his own picture, and the look is long lenses, hazy backlight, the sun always behind somebody’s hair, and slow motion for anything that moves. The rivers and the escarpment are handsome. Then Jane goes for a swim. Then she goes for another. Jimmy Ling’s edit holds on each one long past the point of interest, and Perry Botkin Jr.’s score swells under the water as though something were happening in it. We were bored by the second bathe and, by the fourth, faintly embarrassed, not by the nudity but by the way the film stops dead for it, like a host who keeps bringing out the same photograph album.

Bo Derek is not an actress of range, and the film does not pretend otherwise. It has cast her as a face and a body and asks nothing further. She says her lines evenly, as if reading out a list, and the camera adores her regardless. The tagline promises the most erotic adventure of all time, and the erotic part is delivered in bulk. It is the adventure that goes missing. For a woman who has crossed an ocean and half a continent, Jane is remarkably unbothered by anything, including being carried off by a stranger in a loincloth.

Richard Harris goes the other way entirely. As James Porter, the explorer father Jane has come to find, he bellows every line to the back of the jungle and delivers speeches about his dead wife and his undiscovered graveyard to anyone within range. He seems to be performing in a different and much louder film. We enjoyed him. It is not a good performance, but it is a living one, and in this company that counts for a great deal. John Phillip Law, as the partner Harry Holt, is handsome and sensible and leaves the memory as he leaves the frame.

Then there is Tarzan. Miles O’Keeffe plays him with no dialogue at all, only the cry and a good deal of standing in profile, and he is on screen far less than his billing suggests. He wrestles a snake and a lion in sequences cut around the fact that he is not really wrestling them, and his orangutan companion gets more close-ups than he does. The second half brings Steve Strong’s Ivory King and his people, and takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it takes a long time.

Patricia Edwards’s costumes amount to a white dress for Jane that loses a little more fabric with every reel, and a loincloth, which is a fair summary of the film’s priorities. Set against the Weissmuller pictures, which were cheap and silly and never stopped moving, this one looks expensive and does not move at all. The old films understood that Tarzan is a chase. Derek has made him a view.

The reviews so far are all negative, and we see why. The appeal here was always going to be Bo Derek, and anyone who has come for that will find a great deal of her, slowly, in good light. Everyone else will find a jungle film in which nobody is in any hurry to get anywhere, least of all the ape man. Watch it, if you must, for Harris, who at least seems to think he is in an adventure.