The sensitive artistry of special makeup effects artist Rick Baker adds immeasurably to the success of GREYSTOKE, one of the few attempts to retell Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan story as originally told.
and must be accessed separately through the menu (which comes with a rudely-shaped cursor). Soft Cel trailers for CAN CAN BUNNY, ANGEL OF DARKNESS, DRAGON PINK and MAGICAL TWILIGHT are the only supple- ments, and only by their in- clusion can the packaging’s announced running time of “approximately 90 minutes” be justified. Your move.
GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN LORD OF THE APES
1984, Warner Home Video, DD-5.1/MA/16:9/LB/ST/CC/+, 136m 48s, DVD-1 By Bill Cooke
Following John and Bo
Derek’s TARZAN THE APE MAN by just a few years, Hugh Hudson’s GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN LORD OF THE APES was an A-list antidote to that former cause of nausea and purported to be, at last, a faithful adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel. That claim proved to be only partly true, for while incidents were re- stored to that hadn’t been seen on film since the 1918 version with Elmo Lincoln, many more
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were fabricated in an attempt to add psychological complex- ity to Burroughs’ dichotomous ape-man. The first half of the film ad-
heres rather closely to the book, only events that would have made for exciting cinema are side-stepped to quickly advance the narrative. For instance, in the novel, John Clayton and his wife are stranded on a West African beach by mutineers following a bloody shipboard battle. The film simplifies these busy opening chapters by economi- cally segueing from a rain-spat- tered window—through which the Earl of Greystoke (Ralph Richardson) watches his son and daughter-in-law depart by coach—to an African beach lit- tered with driftwood from a ship- wreck. Another condensation occurs when the narrative jumps a year forward and we find that the Claytons have fashioned a bamboo hut and a baby has been born. When Clayton discovers in the next instance that his wife Alice is in fact dead, actor Paul Geoffrey goes over the top ex- pressing grief, but since we’ve been denied the chance to get to know these characters, the scene lacks emotional weight. In
the next moment, apes that have been slowly encroaching on the hut enter and slaughter Clayton, while a female ape—sadly toting a dead baby—picks up the in- fant Lord Greystoke in her great paws and claims him as her own. The next roughly 30m are the
film’s most memorable, as a se- ries of vignettes chart the growth of Tarzan and his ascension to king of his tribe. The adult apes are portrayed by a crack team of pantomime artists in costumes by makeup artist and simian spe- cialist Rick Baker, whose work here was unparalleled until he trumped himself with MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1998). Baker gives each costume unique character- istics—a feminine smile and wa- tery eyes for Tarzan’s adoptive mother, a silver beard for his fa- ther, floppy ears for his boyhood friend, and an almost cartoon- ishly fiendish face for his nem- esis—so that we may easily differentiate between them, while baby apes are played by real chimpanzees, the same tack that the makers of the 1932 TARZAN THE APE-MAN employed. Again simplifying Burroughs’ original story, the number of ape adver- saries is cut down to just one (in the novel, Tarzan’s ape-father
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