Tarzan the Ape Man

Directed by W. S. Van Dyke, Tarzan the Ape Man follows Johnny Weissmuller’s title character as he meets and eventually falls in love with Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane. Filmmaker Van Dyke, armed with a script by Cyril Hume, delivers a woefully tiresome (and mostly interminable) disaster that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the movie, which runs a wildly overlong 99 minutes, suffers from a meandering atmosphere that generally stresses pointless and infuriatingly padded-out digressions – with this certainly true of the picture’s long, drawn-out shots of animals and natives doing their (tedious) thing. And while O’Sullivan admittedly offers up charming work as the streetwise Jane, Tarzan the Ape Man’s failure can also be attributed to a bland and charisma-free turn by Weissmuller that makes it virtually impossible to root for or sympathize with his iconic figure. By the time the endless, action-packed climax rolls around, Tarzan the Ape Man has undoubtedly cemented its place as a thoroughly disagreeable misfire that’s aged horribly in the years since its 1932 debut. (The special effects are, for example, utterly laughable and ineffective.)

1/2* out of ****