TARZAN AND THE HUNTRESS (1947)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


For the second-to-last Weismuller Tarzan, the series provides another sociological oscillation.  Right on the heels of LEOPARD WOMAN, with its championing of civilization's benefits, TARZAN AND THE HUNTRESS offers another critique of civilization's evils. 

Unfortunately, HUNTRESS is one of the more routine Tarzan entries, seemingly serving as a template for many episodes of the later "Bomba" and "Jungle Jim" serials.  Titular huntress Tanya Rawlins (Patricia Morison) heads an expedition to an unnamed country ruled by one King Ferrod, whose people all have a vague "Arab-Polynesian" look to them, now standard in Tarzan films in this period. Tanya's purpose is to gather animals to sell to the zoos in the civilized world.  Tarzan encounters the animal-hunters and it's hate at first sight; he wants them out of his jungle, pronto.  King Ferrod isn't as much of a hard-liner: he'll allow the white hunters to trap two animals, one male and one female, to take back with them.

Tanya isn't the main villain here, though: she's more like the "enabler" who allows real villainy to serve her purposes.  To get around King Ferrod's ruling, Tanya's cruel trail boss Weir conspires with Ferrod's nephew.  Weir and his men shoot Ferrod and his son so that the nephew can take over the throne; then the nephew allows the hunters to plunder all the animals they want.  In a more politicized context it would be a pretty good metaphor for colonial relationships to the colonized: not so much "dollar diplomacy" as "death diplomacy."

Tarzan smells a rat and summons the animals away from the hunters in what is easily the film's best scene.  Eventually the ape man, Cheetah and Boy steal all the guns from the hunters' camp, putting them at the mercy of the jungle they wished to despoil.  Tanya tries to use her charms on Tarzan to make him relent, but it's no sale.  However, that mischievious monkey Cheetah accidentally leads the villains to their guns again, and so the game begins again.  Tarzan finds Ferrod's son, who has survived the assassination attempt, and eventually calls down a herd of elephants to stomp the hunters' camp.  In keeping with the rules of jungle etiquette, Tanya manages to escape the chaos with only a pilot to fly her plane.  A much better reprise of the essential plot appears in 1953's TARZAN AND THE SHE-DEVIL, in particular because it gives more time to Jane, who barely has anything to do in HUNTRESS.  This was also the last outing for Johnny Sheffield's Boy.  His character disappeared from the series when he left to do the BOMBA films, and though later Tarzan films occasionally brought in juvenile sidekicks for the ape man, none of them stuck, though a regular kid-friend did appear in the 1960s Tarzan teleseries.