The most intelligent and perhaps the best filmic treatment of Edgar Rice Burroughs's classic pulp novels about Tarzan, the white child of noble blood raised by apes in the jungle, since Elmo Lincoln first brought the character to the screen in 1918.
The film opens with the shipwreck that casts Lord Jack Clayton (Paul Geoffrey) and his pregnant wife Lady Alice (Cheryl Campbell) on the wild coast of Africa. They build a hut in the jungle, she bears a son, and shortly thereafter they both die. The infant is adopted by a clan of apes, with whom
he grows to manhood, after which his ape mother is killed by pygmies. They also wipe out the first white men that Tarzan (Christopher Lambert) has ever seen, a party of hunters. He saves one of them, a wounded Belgian, Captain Phillippe D'Arnot (Ian Holm), who teaches him to speak English.
Eventually Tarzan returns to civilization with D'Arnot and goes to his ancestral home in Scotland, Greystoke Manor. There, his grandfather, the Sixth Lord of Greystoke (Sir Ralph Richardson), tries to integrate his heir into upper-crust society.
The film is beautifully photographed and marvelously acted, with Lambert showing remarkable subtlety and emotion. Richardson, in his final film role, is even better; he carries much of the second half of the film when the story starts to sag. The special-effects costuming by Rick Baker is superb and his actor-apes are so expressive and natural that it is almost impossible to tell them from real apes. Nominated by the Academy for Best Supporting Actor (Richardson), Best Screenplay (co-writer Robert Towne writing under the pseudonym P.H. Vasak), and
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