5/29/2023 0 Comments The legend of tarzan book![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Why does Clayton go back to Africa? It takes a lot of setup. His splendid backstory, meanwhile, is sprinkled through the action in brief, hazy flashbacks, so the whole thing feels like a sequel to a movie that was never made. It opens with Alexander Skarsgård as Tarzan - né John Clayton, Lord of Greystoke - back in his baronial English manse, where he’s “hybridizing coconuts,” with no intention of returning to the Belgian Congo. ![]() The new Tarzan film, The Legend of Tarzan, plays as if a dog ate part of the script. Fifty years later, Robert Towne wrote a script that honored its source, but it was so mucked-up by English director Hugh Hudson that Towne gave the credit to his dog. The old Johnny Weissmuller pictures dumbed Tarzan down, but he and Maureen O’Sullivan looked scrumptious in their skimpy loincloths (at least before the Hayes Office came along and covered them up). He also finds his dead parents’ treehouse (still with their skeletons) and teaches himself to read (though he has no idea how the words actually sound - or that the skeletons are his parents). Raised by apes, the child of shipwrecked English aristocrats doesn’t turn out a dearie like Mowgli in The Jungle Book but a badass killer who swings soundlessly through trees and drops nooses on his foes (human and animal). Why do filmmakers always louse up Tarzan? The 1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs book has a sensational first half, before the inevitable Victorian-Edwardian–era corniness and cultural supremacy kick in. ![]()
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