Coluna Claquete – April, 19th 2013
Movie of the Week: “Tarzan”
Although it is in its umpteenth film version, the character Tarzan always leds me to miss my childhood and arises curiosity about what news it will bring. This time, “Tarzan” brings dinosaurs, mysterious asteroids with infinite energy, corporate intrigues and a lot of action. Are you confuse? Well, this “salad” was cool, mainly by referring to the universe of books from Edgar Rice Burroughs
The first time the character Tarzan appeared to the world was in 1912, in the magazine All-Story Magazine, thanks to the imagination of the american writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. Two years later, it would be published in book form under the title “Tarzan, the Son of the Jungle.” More than two dozen books would be published by the author with the adventures of the hero, that would come to brazilian readers thanks to phenomenal translators as Monteiro Lobato, Godofredo Rangel and Manuel Bandeira.
My childhood was populated by imaginary world of Tarzan, books read and reread many times, legacy from my parents, who instilled in me a love of reading. These books are still with me until today, alongside the collection of Sherlock Holmes.
The Tarzan from the books was the survivor of a family tragedy, where her father and pregnant mother had been driven from a ship after a mutiny of the crew, being abandoned somewhere on the African coast. The mother died in childbirth and his father, the English nobleman John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, was killed by a gorilla. The baby is saved by Kala, a monkey of the same tribe, who had lost her son. Tarzan is raised by her and grows in the jungle, uniting the intelligence of man and the qualities of wildlife.
In the current film, Greystoke is the owner of an energy company of the same name, that takes his family to Africa in search of a mysterious power source. When they find the source, an asteroid falled on earth millions of years in the past, the helicopter in which they were dropped in the jungle, and only the boy, JJ, is saved by a female gorilla, which adopts him.
Years later, William Clayton, the administrator of Greystoke Energy suports a research expedition, supposed to observe gorillas, but always with the goal of finding the asteroid. Taking a small army of mercenaries, he forces the participation of Jim Porter and his daughter Jane. The girl had already been saved by Tarzan on another occasion, when she was lost in the jungle and bitten by a snake. When they meet again, they feel attracted to each other, but the battle against the perfidious Clayton is most important.
Maybe the spectator be surprised with this profusion of new facts in such a familiar story, but along the work of Burroughs, his hero went through several adventures such as a Roman city in the jungle, medieval jousting, fights against the Germans in World War II, strange men-ants, jurassic monsters, and even a walk in the center of the Earth!
Tarzan came quickly to cinemas, only four years after the first book, when the actor Elmo Lincoln played the hero in the silent film “Tarzan the Ape Man”, a characterization that looked like a caveman. Many other actors incarnate Tarzan on screen, as Lex Barker and Gordon Scott, but what really gave a face to the character was the former Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller.
Weissmuller starred as Tarzan in twelve films, six of them alongside Maureen O’Sullivan, between 1932 and 1948. The conservative American society forced the augmentation of the clothes of the protagonists, because they were considered indecents. Boy, the son, had to be adopted, since they were not married. The famous Tarzan yell also came from these movies, being in fact a skillful mix of sounds of baritone, soprano and trained dogs.
In the current film, besides the famous cry, it was added the famous “me Tarzan, you Jane,” dialogue that never existed in the previous films, nor in the original book, as when Tarzan met Jane, he only knew how to speak the language of the apes .
Tributes and poetic freedoms aside, “Tarzan” is a film destined to children public, without the boring singing of Disney (though with a beautiful passage from “Paradise” by Coldplay), lots of action, and a beautiful message about family and environmental preservation. For boys of all ages.