We all understand that John Derek‘s Tarzan the Ape-Man (’81) is one of the worst major-studio films ever released. But I’ve never described the rollicking experience of watching it in the MGM/UA screening room at 729 Seventh Avenue, sometime in late July of that year.
We’d all read or heard about MGM being reluctant or at the very least antsy about releasing Derek’s film, so no one was expecting anything great. (Filming in Sri Lanka had happened only five months earlier.) We were certainly braced for some Bo Derek nudity and Miles O’Keeffe beefcake and a certain amount of amusement.
Then it started and it wasn’t too bad — big-game hunter Richard Harris determined to shoot the white ape, doing his elocutionary blowhard thing, barking at Derek, etc. Then buffed-up O’Keeffe appeared and it was “oh, God, here we go.” Then came the lion on the beach scene.
The film was focusing on something gentle and disarming — probably Bo and Miles relating to each other in some playful way — when all of a sudden Derek and his editor, Jimmy Ling, hit us with a sudden smash cut of a big male lion strolling on a beach, and I mean not prey-stalking in the slightest. It was as if the lion was out for a Sunday stroll and enjoying the sunshine and warm air, and was incidentally moving in the general direction of the camera.
Derek and Ling wanted us to jump in our seats and go “oh my God, here comes a scary lion!” But the shot had the opposite effect — the critic-journos I saw it with immediately whooped and chuckled because the shot wasn’t set up. (Somebody joked “Whoa!” or something in that vein.) Because lions who intend to attack always crouch down as they slowly approach, fixing gaze on the prey.
The proper strategy would have been to show us the lion trudging through the jungle and looking for something to eat. And then he approaches the beach and steps onto the smooth sand and stops and eyeballs Derek and O’Keeffe 40 or 50 yards away. Cut to a close-up of his predator eyes, and then an MCU of the lion crouching down and beginning to stalk them. That’s how lions do it. But Derek and Ling decided against that.
The second howler was a scene in which O’Keeffe saves Derek from a huge anaconda snake in a muddy river or lake, and winds up wrestling the slithery beast in slow motion. One presumes that the footage Derek had captured of the wrestling match didn’t last long enough — not enough jeopardy, too quickly disposed of — so he and Ling stretched it out in slow-mo, except now the wrestling went on too long. There was no scheme or tension to the struggle — it was almost on the level of Martin Landau‘s Bela Lugosi wrestling with a fake octopus in Bride of the Monster (or, if you will, Ed Wood).
After a certain point the critic-journo laughter began again…”is O’Keeffe going to stab the snake and strangle it or what? Jesus, will somebody end this thing?”
Having cost $8 million to shoot and prepare for release, Tarzan the Ape Man opened in 950 theatres on 8.7.81, and became the highest-grossing film of the weekend with a gross of $6,700,809. It went on to gross $36,565,280 in the United States and Canada — solidly profitable.