Greystoke

During one of the previous free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the movie Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. It's going to be on again this week, first tomorrow at 12:06 PM on ActionMax, and again on Friday, so I recently watched it to do a review on it here.

Now, most of us probably have certain ideas in mind when we think of Tarzan: athletic figures like Johnny Weismuller and the cheesy sets of the 1930s, or the even more muscle-bound actors of the 1950s. But this movie is more of an origin story for Tarzan, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' book Tarzan of the Apes. The movie starts off with a brief establishing scene in equatorial western Africa (these scenes were filmed in Cameroon) in 1885, before switching to Scotland just before those establishing scenes. In Scotland, the 6th Earl of Greystoke (Sir Ralph Richardon in his final role, as he died not long after filming wrapped) is seeing his son and daughter-in-law off. They're going to Africa, presumably one of the British colonies. But their ship is shipwrecked, and the husband and wife are the only two survivors.

Well, not quite, as the wife is pregnant, eventually giving birth to a baby boy. In order to survive, the husband has built a Swiss Family Robinson-type house in the rainforest canopy. But one day apes overrun it, finding the mom having just died of malaria (well, not that the apes know what malaria is) and killing the dad, leaving only the little baby as the survivor. One of the apes has just lost her own offspring, so she takes the human baby as her own. It's highly implausible, of course, but without that we wouldn't have much of a movie.

The movie proceeds slowly from here, showing several stages in the young human boy's development, when in the real world he would have either been killed directly by the apes or left to starve. But the boy grows, finds where his parents died althogh he doesn't realize these were his parents, and eventually grows up. After about 20 years of this, a party of British game hunters looking for specimens for a British museum comes through, led by a Belgian ship's captain Philippe d'Arnot (Ian Holm). African natives ambush the expedition, killing everybody but Philippe, who escapes until he is discovered by the now adult grandson of the Earl of Greystoke (played by Christopher Lambert).

After a fair bit of time, Philippe is able to put all the pieces together, and discover that this young man who rescued him is the heir to British nobility, so he gets the name John after his late father. John is also a natural mimic, being able to mimic a whole bunch of animal sounds but also human words, which is how he's able to pick up languages (even though that wouldn't happen either in real life if the right part of the human brain isn't developed by a certain age). Philippe is eventually able to recover, and he takes John back to Scotland.

Of course John doesn't know anything of civilization, but his grandfather is thrilled to see him. The Earl also has a ward, Jane (Andie MacDowell), who is about the same age as the young John. Jane takes a liking to John, trying to teach him to socialize, which is difficult for John. Some of the other people around the Earl of Greystoke see John more as a novelty, but also expect him to become civilized and either don't see or don't care why John has the issues he does. Things become more tougher for John when he learns how the British treat the apes, and when the Earl dies in a tragic accident....

This version of the Tarzan story is, as I said, quite different from most previous film versions. It's beautifully made, in line with the cycle of period pieces coming from British producers of the era; indeed, the director here, Hugh Hudson, had previously done Chariots of Fire. The characterizations are also well done. But boy does the movie move at a sedate pace. (And Wikipedia claims there was a fair bit cut before release.) That slowness is something that might make Greystoke a bit difficult for some people to sit through.