Arts
Going ape
Peter Ackroyd
Greystoke — The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (PG', selected cinemas)
Despite its somewhat portentous title, this is simply a modernised and more expensive version of a conventional 'Tar- zan' production — complete with snakes, panthers, turbulent natives and landscapes against which profiles can be seen to advan- tage. And there are, of course, the usual implausibilities: Tarzan miraculously ac- quires a loincloth after reaching puberty, and his hair remains at only a modest shoulder-length after two decades in the jungle. What is the point of having apes behave like people, if the people don't behave like people? As in earlier cinematic versions of 'Tarzan', also, the narrative relies upon a mixture of coincidence and violence to breathe even the faintest life in- to a script which offers only a few varia- tions on the theme of `Me Tarzan, you Jane'.
Tarzan himself, played here by Chris- topher Lambert, is a rather uglier and less muscular image than those previously of- fered by Johnny Weissmuller et al: with a vast jaw set in an elongated face, he is the perfect primitive, although even he cannot render all those `ugh-ugh-ughs' convincing. The apes are also more distinctive than usual, but that is principally because they are played by actors in hairy suits. They seemed to be a reasonable facsimile of the genuine creature, although there were occa- sions when their putative smiles and frowns (moral: they're just like us, really) brought back vivid memories of some of the worst moments from Planet of the Apes. And nothing on earth can make the tribal life of apes dramatically significant, despite the ef- forts of the director, Hugh Hudson, to in- vest their territorial battles with almost Hemeric significance. Apes are boring, ex- cept possibly to other apes. But it is a pro- blem which even Eisenstein could not have resolved: in order to make apes even vague- ly interesting, they would have to be in- vested with so many human characteristics that they were no longer convincing as animals. And so one is left with a simian version of the pantomime horse.
Greystoke does attempt to draw com- parisons between the violence of the human and animal worlds but, since this is the con- ventional attitude of such films, it can be safely disregarded as the sentimental moralising which it is. For that reason alone, it was entirely predictable that Tar- zan, having suffered the civilities of English society, should decide to return to the jungle. That is what genuinely unspoiled heroes are supposed to do — although most
of them only went so far as America. In other words, this was a film which followed doggedly in pursuit of one central idea, and there was very little room left for anything else — the moral slowed everything down, drained the narrative of dramatic potential, and severely tested the patience of the au- dience (there was a great deal of human chattering in the cinema which I attended, a sure sign that the film had not been able to engage the attention of the spectators). Even those moments which might have been of some interest or power — when, for example, Tarzan is taught to utter his first human word — were ineptly or sketchily handled.
But even if we guess that the Rousseau- like foliage has been recreated in a studio, and that the tigers have been borrowed from a local zoo, the scenes in the jungle are nevertheless far superior to those set in the Earl of Greystoke's country seat; at once the virtues of having no human dia- logue become apparent. Enter Tarzan, who has been yodelling in the courtyard; he has that primitive look, which always spells trouble for his bewildered fiancée. She has already been severely bruised by his ape-like antics, although she still insists on dressing like the late Princess Royal. 'Half of me is the Earl of Greystoke,' he tells her — and she probably knows which half — 'the other half of me is wild!' (no doubt Tony Benn's sentiments before he disclaimed his peerage). Perhaps the script-writer caught sleeping sickness while on location in the Cameroons.
The contrast between man and ape was clearly quite enough of an effort for everyone concerned, since no real attempt is made to distinguish the human characters — Ian Holm has a funny Belgian accent, and John Wells a funny English accent, but that is all. Ralph Richardson manages some light social comedy, although even he could not shine in a film which unerringly chooses the conventional scene and the familiar em- phasis. Mr Hudson does not seem able to elicit convincing performances from his cast, all of whom remained rather wooden (a situation not helped by some appalling dubbing). Perhaps he was too busy with administrative and financial matters to con- centrate upon the film itself, and he has been complaining bitterly about the cuts
The Spectator 21 April 1984 which have been made against his will -- but it would be grossly unfair to blame
of
upon the clumsy demands et studio bosses. For, as Chariots of Fire demonstrated, Mr Hudson has a somewhat pedestrian imagination. In Greystoke he uses separate scenes simply to illustrate ail emotion or push the story a millimetre for" ward, without being able to make those passages cohere. Scene follows scene In .a sufficiently decorative manner, but there Is, no unity of action or characterisation as a result, the film never amounts to more than the sum of its increasingly fissiparous. parts. It is not, in the end, a very intelligent enterprise.
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