a working vacation in the African wild, collecting animals for a zoo. Swimmer Eleanor Holm is utterly charming in the role of the daughter, who finds the gentle jungle savage preferable to her trigger-happy fiancé (George Meeker). They hang out on tree limbs and swim together, much like the Tarzan and Jane of MGM’s concurrent series, and Morris even gets to emulate Weissmuller’s best pickup line: “Tarzan... Eleanor!” When a horny sheik (C. Henry Gordon of CHARLIE CHAN IN THE WAX MUSEUM) kidnaps Eleanor for his harem, Tarzan raids a secret jungle pleasure palace to rescue her. He cuts the ropes on a swinging bridge and men fall screaming into a river full of flesh-eating crocodiles, an idea that George Lucas adopted for the climax of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984). Despite the title’s prom- ise of “Revenge,” the film is ap- pealingly breezy, with its fun ensemble—including Hedda Hopper as Eleanor’s allergic, mosquito-swatting mother—
Gordon Scott, a former lifeguard and the most muscular of all screen Tarzans, stars in the cut-rate TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS.
planting tongues firmly in cheeks and clearly having a ball. When his proposed TARZAN
TV series failed to generate in- terest, the tireless Sol Lesser strung together what he already had in the can and released it as the awkward feature, TARZAN
Decathlon Olympian Glenn Morris adds vine-swinging to his list of feats in TARZAN’S REVENGE.
AND THE TRAPPERS (1958, 69m 43s). For years, Lesser had been enjoying rights to the MGM characters, so Tarzan (Gordon Scott) is back to domesticity with Jane (Eva Brent), Boy (Rickie Sorensen) and Cheeta the chimp. In the first half-hour, Tarzan struggles to free his ani- mal friends from a couple of ruth- less trappers; while in the second storyline—a variation on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME—a big-game hunter vows ven- geance on Tarzan for sending his trapper-brother to prison: “Now I can try my skills against the smartest of all animals—the King of the Jungle!” A former lifeguard and future star of Italian sword- and-sandal epics, Gordon Scott flexes the most muscles of any movie Tarzan, but his vine swing- ing is not graceful and the intel- ligence he exudes seems at odds with the way Lesser has him speak—in the grunting Weissmuller fashion, of course. (Starting the next year, Scott would play an articulate ape- man in a pair of superior Tarzan
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