LAMBERTATHON:
GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES (1984)

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john cribbs

The power play for top monkey culminates in an intense battle between 'zan and the ape bully (note: much scarier than an ant bully) during which the kid uses his superior human skills to throw his opponent off his game. You can see where a background in dance and lean physique to match helped Lambert with the choreography of this brutal melee. While not the Olympic adonis like Johnny Weissmuller, he's agile and powerfully imposing - it's believable that he'd be a match for a rampaging giant ape with nothing to lose. They dive underwater...then blood bubbles to the surface followed by the corpse of the evil chimp and shortly thereafter by Tarzan, lord of the monkeys.

Actually this scraggly, toned berserker is never actually called Tarzan in the film. According to the books "Tarzan" means "white-skin" in the fictional ape language Mangani, so it would have been totally acceptable to have his monkey brethren refer to him as such in the movie, but unless the pronounciation is a series of grunts (there's no monkey subtitling) he remains nameless. That is until Holm realizes that he's discovered the long-lost John Clayton, at which point Lambert is washed up, trades his loincloth for a really good suit and accompanies Holm to the Scottish estate of Greystoke.

I'd be curious to know whether or not Robert Towne intended the story to switch mid-movie from being an action-packed adventure set in exotic jungle locales to a wry comedy of manners planted at a stuffy British estate for the remaining running time. Either way, the transition is jarring - like Star Wars turning into A Room with a View after the escape from the Death Star. Tarzan becomes the rudimentary fish out of water, his ape-like ways not harmonizing with the civilized upper crust, and he goes through the standard set of awkward social moments such as trying to grab the hand of a figure in a painting (oh Tarzan, you ignorant goofball!) To accomodate the formula there's the pompous dillweed - “You’ve got a lot to learn, Jungle Man!” - to whom you're just praying Tarzan delivers an orangutan-style beatdown and the girl who's fascinated by this uncouth simpleton and his strange ways. The girl of course is Jane of the "Me Tarzan" word association, played by Andie MacDowell but dubbed by Glenn Close, allegedly because MacDowell couldn't shake her natural Southern draw which the filmmakers declared anachronistic.* This leads to a number of questions, the most obvious being why cast MacDowell in the first place? If the voice doesn't fit the character find someone who does, why go to all the effort? But even more beguiling is the fact that the kid playing a younger version of the character earlier in the movie has a distinct American accent, and Jane is described as "American" twice in the movie, yet Close sticks to a very regal British dialect. Then again, maybe Jane is just pretentious.  

Not surprisingly MacDowell falls for the roguish Lambert, thus further infuriating her fiance, the aforementioned dillweed. And he's more than happy to return the affection: he sniffs her shoulder, they flirt, he jumps up and down on her bed in the traditional act of monkey mating. But it's possible Lord Ralph Richardson is even more in love with his estranged grandson, finding Tarzan's faux pas of slurping up soup sans spoon whimsically charming. Of course everything goes downhill, events transpire to convince Tarzan that this hoopla of a modern age is not his flavor and in the film's final scene returns alone to the dark reclusion of the jungle.

"Rescued From the Wild" films are often telling reflections of the filmmaker. I'm thinking specifically of Truffaut's The Wild Child and Herzog's Kaspar Hauser (and a little of Walk Like a Man with Howie Mandel.) Truffaut was raised in an orphanage, so his affinity towards the feral child is drawn from his sympathy for outcast children. Herzog's theme of a different, alienated form of communication was literalized through Bruno Schleinstein's grown man "born" into civilization. What can be discerned from Hudson based on Greystoke and his representation of Tarzan is a boarding schoolboy's fantasy of surrendering to savage instincts, shedding the confines of decorum for untamed, childlike abandon. That sentiment could be read as anti-British, which makes sense when you consider the director's next film glorified the American fight for Independence (Revolution, the movie that effectively ruined his reputation as a revered filmmaker and was re-released two years ago to little if any interest) and once again, the rough and ragged triumph over the prim and proper. Hudson's theme of going against the grain and rejecting social etiquette for unbridled primativism isn't exactly convincing: his style is too staid and humorless to embrace the sort of spiritual freedom Burroughs' wild man clearly represented to Robert Towne. Is Tarzan a natural survivalist thanks to his jungle upbringing, or is he able to adapt to different environments because he comes from good British stock? There's an imbedded condescension to Hudson's handling of the Greystoke sequences that implies that even though Tarzan is in the right, the way he's behaving should be acknowledged as wrong. As such, the film's celebration of his bestial nature comes off a bit fetishistic, the way a stickler to the rules would be fascinated by some deviant lifestyle. (I'd say that translated into a slightly homosexual subtext, especially considering how sweaty and grunting Lambert constantly is, but since Hudson is married to Maryam d'Abo in real life such interpretation probably wouldn't hold water. Probably.)

Ultimately it's hard to see what Hudson was going for overall. It seems that coming off Chariots of Fire he was trying to trick the Oscars into giving awards to anything he happened to do next, and he partially succeeded: Ralph Richardson, Rick Baker and the screenplay all got nominations. Robert Towne took his name off the film, thus making "P.H. Vazak" the first non-blacklisted fictional person to get a nomination (as well as the first household pet - P.H. Vazak was his dog's name). As Richardson had died in the interim and received a posthumous nod, there must have been a lot of empty seats in the Greystoke section that year! Even assuming he had intentions beyond prestigious recognition, Hudson's interest in the project is still highly egotistical. The title itself is unapologetically high-falutin'.** Making an intelligent/adult adaptation of Edgar Burroughs' pulp fantasies isn't a terrible idea, but introducing the aristocratic plot and rendering the film half jungle adventure/half costume drama sends the movie into a more spiraling identity crisis than Tarzan/Clayton experiences in the Natural History Museum of the film's penultimate scene. Greystoke's gimmick is that it's classier than the Elmo Lincoln/Johnny Weissmuller serials of old, out with the vine and in with the wine, but seriously who does this movie think it is? Just because you're catering to a highbrow audience doesn't mean everyone else needs to be left behind, and the Cameroon half of the movie stands well enough on its own that it could have constituted a larger portion of the film (even splitting the film into equal thirds - jungle, Greystoke, jungle - would have been an improvement.) The movie deals with the dichotomy of primal vs. civilized life, but the one Hudson should have considered was escapist entertainment vs. literary adaptation, because not unlike the " Me Tarzan" subgenre it's trying to avoid falling into the film has very little to say. Sure there's a half-assed humanitarian message, but it serves no purpose other than the movie's own high opinion of itself - "Oh, animal cruelty? Yeah we're against that. We don't want to harm animals, maybe you do but we're against it personally, that's just us."

But let's get to the reason I watched this movie in the first place. Despite the film's shortcomings Lambert could not have asked for a better breakthrough role, and his performance is excellent. Mixed reviews aside, he received tons of positive notice for his first big role: Vincent Canby highlighted his "strong, brooding features" and Harlan Ellison compared his soft-yet-tough expressions to those of Belmondo. Somehow beneath the dried mud, the fleas and the ferocious front he's forced to maintain when straightening up for his ape-boyz, he manages to be absolutely charming even without dialogue; his trademark "lovable scamp" grin also makes its debut here and it's infectious. His father-son relationships, first with a monkey then with Holm and finally with Richardson, are genuinely effecting. He has a recurring gesture when someone has died - he places their hands atop his head and lets go, trying to find some hint of life left in them. This could easily be corny but works thanks to Lambert's presence in that moment: his sorrowful pout at the absence of movement in his loved ones is heartbreaking. Lambert also takes the concept of Tarzan's mimicking, a character aspect Towne had borrowed from Philip José Farmer, and turns it into its own language by physically reinterpreting the things he sees and hears. As previously mentioned he's convincingly dominant in the jungle environment and, as an actor, commits fully to scenes where he's cavorting with real and costumed apes - he's so monkey and he doesn't even know it.

He's equally good in Greystoke scenes. Although surrounded by heavyweight English theater actors (and the manish voice of Glenn Close), Lambert holds his own in the dialogue department. Interestingly, the movie goes out of its way to explain his accent (Ian Holm's character, who teaches Tarzan English, is Belgian), something the makers of Highlander didn't bother with. He wears that excellent suit like a second skin, then makes it seem foreign and awkward when his confusion over his place in the "real world" kicks in. Although the plot of the ape/man identity crisis isn't terribly involving, Lambert sells Tarzan's intense anxiety in trying to adapt to civilization. His difficulty in finding a balance between his two existences, "half Earl of Greystoke, half wild," is really the only thing that keeps the second half of the movie afloat (I love Ralph Richardson as much as the next guy but here he's just filling in the "doting old imbecile" role - give me Richard III any day of the week). Lambert also brings a lot of physical comedy to the table, from his general "monkey" manner to getting caught up in a mangled fishing line. On a lesser but not insignificant note, Brendan Frasier clearly took notes on Lambert's performance for his part in Encino Man.

One final observation: Greystoke Manor is in Scotland.*** Could this possibly be a prequel to Highlander? Maybe these events occurred during his transition from the highlands of Scotland to the mean streets of New York. Did one phase of Connor Macleod's immortal life find him a monarch among monkeys? And you know, Tarzan's claim to the title is itself controversial: he's never seen sitting comfortably atop a throne made of vines, his monkey servants never make him a crown sculpted out of hardened poo. It's possible he plans to introduce the concept of hierarchy to the chimps upon his return but that's a subject for the never-made sequel.

* Anachronistic? The film takes place in, I'm guessing, the late 19th century - there were Americans who talked like that!

** Films that use the word "legend" in the title with a straight face are suspect: Urban Legend, The Legend of Baggar Vance, I Am Legend (Will Smith likes his "legend" titles doesn't he?), Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li and of course Ridley Scott's Legend. Only The Legend of Billie Jean really beats that curse.

*** Andie MacDowell...is that Scottish? "I am Andie MacDowell of the MacDowell clan!"

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