Film
Burroughs licensed the first Tarzan movie in 1918, the silent Tarzan of the Apes. Several dozen Tarzan movies have appeared since that time. Burroughs famously hated the physique of Elmo Lincoln, the first Tarzan. The author imagined his hero’s body as strong but svelte, like a gymnast’s, and Lincoln was enormous and barrel-chested—the size of two Tarzans as conceived by Burroughs.
Eight more Tarzan films were made during the age of silent movies, with five different actors playing the lead. Burroughs’s daughter, Joan, married James Pierce, star of Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927), and the two starred as Tarzan and Jane in the radio show that premiered in 1932. The producers of the silent films retained the movie rights to the Tarzan books for decades. While Burroughs could still authorize use of the Tarzan character in movies, rights issues forced those subsequent projects to change details from the original novels or create new plots altogether; this, in part, accounts for the feral, inarticulate Tarzan that appeared in movies from the 1930s through the late 1950s.
The steamiest and best-loved Tarzan movies are the six Johnny Weissmuller-Maureen O‘Sullivan collaborations of the 1930s and early 1940s. Some fans consider their second effort, Tarzan and His Mate (1934), the top Tarzan movie of all time. Two explorers journey to Africa to plunder ivory from a secret elephant burial ground. One of them is Jane’s former lover, who tries to tempt her back to England. As Jane, O’Sullivan sports a leather bikini and engages in an underwater nude scene that has become legendary. Weissmuller, a two-time Olympic gold medalist for swimming, plays a savage, sensual, but reticent Tarzan. The titillating classic, directed by Cedric Gibbons and Jack Conway, also contains terrific jungle footage and action scenes, including one in which Weissmuller wrestles a crocodile. Tarzan Finds a Son (1939) introduces Boy, the child of Tarzan and Jane. Weissmuller continued to portray Tarzan even without O’Sullivan. In six films, the last of which appeared in 1948, Weissmuller plays a Tarzan oriented toward children.
In the 1960s, several films by producer Sy Weintraub helped spark a Tarzan revival. John Guillermin directed the first of them, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959), which starred Gordon Scott. The flashy new breed of Tarzan movie emphasized slickness and action, eliminating Jane and rewriting the barbarous hero of Weissmuller’s day. Shot on location in Africa, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure depicts an intelligent Tarzan, chasing a group of unscrupulous adventurers, including a young Sean Connery, who travel upriver seeking a secret diamond mine. The next film, Tarzan the Magnificent (1960), shows Tarzan, again played by Scott, escorting the evil Coy Banton to the authorities, pursued by the Banton family, who blow up Tarzan’s boat. The hard-edged, action-packed Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966) shows a strong James Bond influence. In one scene, Tarzan, this time with Mike Henry as the ape-man, crashes an enemy helicopter using only a bola. Fritz Leiber, winner of the Hugo Award for science fiction, wrote a popular novelization of the film.
The 1980s brought an art-house version of the Tarzan tale, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). Directed by Hugh Hudson, who helmed the Academy Award-winning Chariots of Fire (1981), the movie features Christopher Lambert as Tarzan, Andie MacDowell as Jane, and Sir Ralph Richardson in an Oscar-nominated turn as the Sixth Earl of Greystoke. The script, by Michael Austin and P. H. Vazak, is a costume drama that focuses on manners and the Britishness of the tale. The movie opens in Edwardian England before Tarzan’s birth; the second half focuses on Tarzan’s return to civilization and his attempt to adjust to manor life.
Burroughs always envisioned an animated Tarzan movie, but the project did not come to fruition until nearly fifty years after his death, with Disney’s Tarzan (1999). The splendid visuals steal the show, depicting lush landscapes, nimble vine swinging, and rousing animal-action sequences that no live version can match. Drawn from Burroughs’s first novel by a team of screenwriters, the movie features Glenn Close’s voice as that of the ape-mother Kala, Rosie O‘Donnell’s as boyhood friend Terk’s, Minnie Driver’s as Jane’s, and Tony Goldwyn’s as Tarzan’s. The energetic film, with songs by Phil Collins, appeals equally to children and adults, combining a sprightly attitude with a meaningful take on the Tarzan mythology.
Tarzana, California
The history of Tarzana, California began in 1919, when, with the earnings from his novel, Edgar Rice Burroughs purchased a 540-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. General Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times and previous owner of the ranch, had called it Mil Flores, but Burroughs renamed it Tarzana in honor of his novel’s hero. Three years later, Charles L. Daniels bought 320 acres of land adjacent to the Burroughs estate and founded a farming town he named Runnymede. The next year Burroughs subdivided a portion of his land for new homes, calling the space the Tarzana Tract. In 1927, the town of 300—including the Tarzana Tract and the Burroughs ranch—had to assume a new name when its citizens realized that California already had one Runnymede. Today Tarzana, California, is home to close to 30,000 people.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneouswith the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history.Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes through a variety ofpoints of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
NEW YORK TIMES
As a result of a mutiny aboardship, an English nobleman and his wife are marooned in a jungle inhabited by anthropoid apes. Here a child is born; a year later the mother dies. A great ape kills the father, but the baby boy is adopted by a female ape whose own child had just been killed in a fall. The subsequent adventures of Tarzan, as the boy is named by the tribe, make a story of many marvels. An ape in his agility and his prowess, heredity asserts itself; the boy tries to clothe himself, and, without ever having heard any save the ape language, without any conception of the sound of English, he teaches himself to read and write from books found in his father’s cabin. With adventures and perils the book is replete, nor is a strange love story wanting. It closes with a great renunciation, but with the promise of another Tarzan book, which leads the reader to hope that the renunciation was not final. Crowded with impossibilities as the tale is, Mr. Burroughs has told it so well, and has so succeeded in carrying his readers with him, that there are few who will not look forward eagerly to the promised sequel.—July 5, 1914
—July 5, 1914
THE NATION
It is hard to imagine how more elements of mystery and thrill could be assembled between a pair of book-covers. We have heard of human children reared by beasts, but Mowgli is a feeble fancy compared with this hero. Tarzan is not only adopted by a she-ape, he is heir to an English title. He not only travels by preference through the treetops, with or without passengers, but he kills lions by jumping on their backs and carrying the double Nelson to its spine-breaking finish. He teaches himself to read and write English without ever having heard a word spoken, and learns to speak it clubmanly in the course of a week or two. In his character of naked savage he wins the love of the American maiden, and shows the result of Norman blood by his chivalrous treatment of her. He also finds a treasure chest for her indigent popper, rescues her from a forest fire, and performs other feats too numerous to mention in this place. The crowning bit of ingenuity with which the author is to be credited is the means of his identification as the true Lord Greystoke. At six weeks of age he has left infant finger-prints upon a page of his father’s diary, and the diary has survived! Only persons who like a story in which a maximum of preposterous incident is served up with a minimum of compunction can enjoy these casual pages.
—October 1, 1914
BOSTON TRANSC
RIPT
Tarzan, although an impossible character, is most fascinating for a few hours, but no longer. His return has been most satisfactory; but we trust he will not have as many farewell appearances as our other friend, Sherlock Holmes!
—March 20, 1915
E. H. LACON WATSON
There is an age-long struggle always in progress between the critic and the patron of art. Now and again, in the world of books, it grows acute. There are some who cannot endure to see false gods triumph. When a bad book sells in its tens of thousands they raise despairing hands to heaven, and ask vainly what the reviewers are doing that such things are permitted to happen....
Here, for example, is Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the “Tarzan” series, with which he appears to have reaped one of the greatest successes of modern times in the world of books. A short time ago it was difficult to get away from Tarzan: he pursued you on the railway bookstall, in the cinema palace, even (occasionally) in the Law Courts. I believe the name was registered, like that of a patent medicine. To call a performing chimpanzee Tarzan constituted a gross infringement of Mr. Burroughs’s copyright....
In the annals of fiction I confess that I have never seen a more high-spirited disregard for the probabilities than is displayed by Mr. Burroughs in these books, and especially in the later volumes. Tarzan of the Apes is itself pretty steep in parts, but it is a mere nothing to some of those that follow. The author has quite clearly said to himself something like this: “That jungle stuff of Kipling’s was all right, but Rudyard did not know when he had a real good thing. The public will lap up any amount of that dope, strengthened a bit and with plenty of human love interest.” ...
Mr. Burroughs ... builds up his story by a series of short, sharp hammer-blows. And it is precisely this series of shocks that his public want. They are easy to assimilate—as easy as the pictures on a cinema reel. They startle: their appeal to the emotions is direct, and almost brutal. Unless something pretty violent is supplied there is a real danger of the reading public falling asleep over your book. Those old qualities, upon which the critic of old used to set some store—delicacy and restraint—are now worse than useless. If you desire to write a “best seller,” keep your wit and wisdom (if you happen to possess any) well in the background.
—from the Fortnightly Review ( June 1, 1923)
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
I was not writing because of any urge to write nor for any particular love of writing. I was writing because I had a wife and two babies....
I wrote [Tarzan of the Apes] in longhand on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper. I did not think it was a very good story and I doubted if it would sell.
—from Open Road (September 1949)
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
I did read many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s earlier works, but I developed a dislike for his Tarzan even greater than my distaste for spiders.
—as quoted in Richard A. Lupoff’s Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965)
RAY BRADBURY
Kipling was a better writer than Burroughs, but not a better romantic.
—from his introduction to Irwin Porges’s Edgar Rice Burrougbs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975)
Questions
1. Does the theme of a hero or heroine who escapes the confinements of civilization still have a wide appeal among Americans?
2. If you were a movie producer who wanted to do a Tarzan film, how would you change Burroughs’s character to make him more appealing to contemporary audiences?
3. Similarly, how would you change Jane?
4. How is it that so many decent, peaceful readers loved the violence in the Tarzan books? Is it true that many—or most, or all—humans are full of surprising violence and that a book like Tarzan of the Apes siphons it off into their imaginations, where it does no harm? If this suppressed violence exists, is it instinctive, or is it encouraged by our human societies?
On Edgar Rice Burroughs
Cohen, Matt, ed. Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Porges, Irwin. Edgar Rice Burroughs : The Man Who Created Tarzan. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975.
Taliaferro, John. Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan. New York: Scribner, 1999.
On Tarzan
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. “The Tarzan Theme.” Writer’s Digest (June 1932).
Fiedler, Leslie. “Tarzan.” In Books of the Century: A Hundred Years of Authors, Ideas and Literature. Edited by Charles McGrath. New York: Times Books, 1998.
Vidal, Gore. “Tarzan Revisited.” In Reflections upon a Sinking Ship. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969.
On Masculinity
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Kasson, John F. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
Leverenz, David. “The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumppo to Batman.” American Literary History 3:4 (Winter 1991), pp. 753-781.
Roosevelt, Theodore. “Wild Man and Wild Beast in Africa.” The National Geographic Magazine 22:1 (January 1911).
Other Literary, Cultural, and Historical Contexts
Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History. New York: Scribner, 1916.
Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Keim, Curtis A. Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.
Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937.
Lawrence, D. H. 1923. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Stanley, Henry Morton. In Darkest Africa; or, The Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin Pasha, Governor of Equatoria. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1890.
Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
a Administrative department established to oversee the affairs of colonial possessions of the British crown.
b In 1888 British colonies of western Africa included Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Gold Coast (Ghana); it is unclear which colony Burroughs had in mind.
c Port in Sierra Leone.
d Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.
e Wood or metal bar to which a rope can be secured.
f This primate is an invention of Burroughs.
g Pisang is a Malay word for banana; scitamine is an order of tropical plants.
h This and the later reference to 10 degrees south latitude (p. 148) place the story’s action in Angola.
i Term for Africa popularized by, among others, Henry Morton Stanley in Through the Dark Continent (1878).
j State of gloomy meditation, absent-mindedness, or deep thought.
k In 1908, in response to international pressure the Belgian parliament annexed the Congo Free State, which became the Belgian Congo.
l Heroine of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; she is crafty in legal maneuvers.
m “Feet of clay” is a figure of speech that indicates a hidden weakness or flaw in a respected person.
n Strong alcoholic drink very popular in France until its prohibition in 1915.
o High-velocity rifle used for hunting big game.
p Car with a six-cylinder engine.
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