TARZAN IN MANHATTAN (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

This TV-movie may be the only time that a version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' ape-man, rather than some unreasonable facsimile, was used for purposes of light romantic comedy. Judging MANHATTAN as a comedy allows me to forgive the film's shortcomings in the thrills department. 

The hero's origins are partly rewritten to give him slightly greater cognizance of the world outside his jungle upbringing. This time Tarzan (Joe Lara) was a very young boy when a plane carrying him and his parents crashed in the African jungle, resulting in the deaths of his parents (still English lords) and his adoption by an ape named Kala. There's just one line in the whole film where it matters that Tarzan has some childhood memories, and since it's not a very important line, I suspect the film's makers wanted to play down the sense of Tarzan as a pure product of savage life.

Nothing else from the origins of Book-Tarzan apply to the film, except that Kala is still alive as the movie opens. In the novel, Kala is slain by a tribesman hunting for food, which sets up Tarzan's antipathy with said tribe. Here, however, a group of hunters from America kill Kala and abduct Tarzan's chimp friend Cheetah (essentially identical to all the other chimp-buddies of Movie-Tarzan). Tarzan finds clues that indicate the hunters went back to some part of New York, and he makes it his business to rescue his chimp-friend and avenge his ape-mother.

Despite putting his best semi-civilized foot forward, the ape man gets detained upon entering the U.S, for reasons the script doesn't bother to clarify. He breaks out of jail (this Tarzan shows off his supernormal strength more than most do) and wanders through Manhattan in his loinclothed getup. By chance he engages a cab being driven by feisty Brooklyn girl Jane Porter (Kim Crosby), and a friendship of mismatched backgrounds is born. 

As was the case for the Jane in the first Weissmuller film, this heroine's budding romance with Tarzan is counterpointed by her struggles to separate herself from her father's protective aegis. MANHATTAN's father (Tony Curtis) is even given the first name "Archimedes" like the fussy professor of the book, though in this incarnation Jane's dad is a hard-boiled ex-cop with the unfortunate habit of kicking down the apartment door of his grown daughter when he thinks she may be in over her head. He also wants her to join him working as a private eye, but Jane would rather find her own identity, though arguably she just transfers her father-imago to the mysterious half-naked guy from the jungle.

MANHATTAN never gets tired of the "fish out of water" schtick, and to the film's credit a few of the jokes are funny, and the script doesn't ever totally forget Tarzan's main reason for his New York sojourn. The alliance of ape-man, cab driver and New York cop does ferret out an organization doing brain-experiments on captive jungle animals, headed by a nasty pseudo-Nietzchean plotter (Jan-Michael Vincent, in one of his few meaty post-AIRWOLF roles). The tone gets more serious when Archimedes is injured, and Jane wants to seek her own vengeance, though this Brooklyn broad never displays any real toughness. Tarzan still saves the day, and he even displays a new skill, being able to subtly communicate with trained dogs the way other versions of the hero could commune with elephants. In an atypical ending for a Tarzan movie, not only does Jane resign herself to working with her dad at his agency, they both talk Tarzan into sticking around for more New York adventures. This conclusion invites the suspicion that MANHATTAN might have been conceived as a potential pilot for a TV show, though nothing materialized.

Tony Curtis hams things up, but almost all of his movie-roles were hammed-up anyway. Crosby, much more of a theater-thespian than a performer in movies and TV, does her level best with the thinly written Jane character, but I'm afraid no one's going to nominate her as one of the great Janes, even for the small screen. Oddly, though neither of the telefilm's two writers had ever before written anything remotely fantasy-oriented for film or TV, William Gough went on to work on a handful of episodes for the 1991-92 TARZAN series starring Wolf Larson (which series was sometimes dubbed "Tree-Hugger Tarzan").

Though Joe Lara won't be remembered as a great Tarzan, he does consistently imbue the hero with a staunch dignity and an occasional sense of humor. Even though funny things happen around his Tarzan, his ape-man is never the butt of the jokes, and he carries out the few action-scenes with aplomb. This role almost certainly led to his being cast as a very different ape-man in the single season of the syndicated series TARZAN: THE EPIC ADVENTURES. Though EPIC had its moments of pure cheese, I appreciated its attempt to do a television Tarzan who kept getting pulled into all sorts of wild pulp-adventures, like his prose forbear.