The Ape Man (always wearing a tiny loin cloth.) reveals his worthiness by freeing Bo not just from another phallic symbol, a gigantic boa constrictor, but by rescuing her from a deflowering at the -errh- hand of a semi-retarded savage local who had planned to make Jane his bride. When Bo Derek approaches Harris and his gleaming cannon, she arrives from the submissive position in the frame, from below.studying the shining cannon wide-eyed.Įven Richard Harris (who regrettably plays his first scene without pants.) and his silver cannon, however, can't compete with Tarzan in the phallus department. The cannon, not surprisingly, is pointed due north. Uh huh.įinally, there's an absolutely incredible, shameless, downright brazen composition in which Harris is seen to be polishing a large chrome cannon (placed in the frame around his crotch level). Later, Holt (a milquetoast) explains to Jane that it takes a very "big" (!) man - her father - to go into wild Africa in search of a mythical inland sea, which is tucked secretly away behind a giant stone protrusion in the land, an outcropping of insurmountable rock that Bo and the others must scale. "I held her too long I loved her too hard," he explains regretfully, providing way too much information about a scene I don't want to envision.
Not child-birth, mind you, but conception. Parker informs Jane that her mother almost died "during conception." You read that right. Since this battle of the - ahem - larger-than-life men is the crucible of the narrative, both male characters are depicted by director John Derek in - how shall I say this? - distinctly phallic terms.įor instance, Mr. Yes, she must select one of the two Alpha males in her life: either bad old Dad or hunky, heroic Tarzan.
James Parker is a central character in the screenplay, however, which concerns Jane's journey of self-discovery. Richard Harris (who also starred with Bo Derek in Orca back in the disco decade), plays Jane's father in this version of Tarzan, and he takes his performance waaaay over-the-top. That baton-passing alone is a cinematic milestone, I'd estimate. In terms of bad movie history, the torch of bad-actors starring in soft-porn genre films is passed from John Phillip Law ( Barbarella), playing a photographer named Holt, to chiseled Miles O'Keeffe, portraying Tarzan. The basic idea of this "re-imagination" (before the term re-imagination was even a glint in Tim Burton's eye.), is a depiction of the Tarzan story re-framed and re-parsed from Jane's naive perspective and as a sort of soft-core travelogue across gorgeous, picturesque, wild Africa.Īccordingly, the film's photography (of bodies and exterior locations.) is never less than beautiful (some might say stunning), and there's no studio fakery to break the illusion of a sojourn into the bush, so-to-speak. I realize the purists (and just about everybody else.) hated Tarzan the Ape Man when it was released back in the early 1980s, but I have to tell you: it's an absolute riot, and thoroughly entertaining (if not always intentionally so.). After all, the film is a lingering, loving tribute not to Edgar Rice Burroughs' seemingly immortal jungle man character, but to Derek's legendary and statuesque, perfectly-sculpted body and her character's tantalizing sense of sexual "innocence." It was produced - seemingly - entirely for male consumption and pleasure. Naturally, she's talking about the reasons why women are put on this Earth (for men's pleasure not their own.), but she might as well be discussing the reasons this film looks the way it does.
Not ours," states Bo Derek (as prim and proper Jane Parker), in her husband (John Derek's) sexual-skewing interpretation of the Tarzan mythos, Tarzan The Ape Man (1981).