TARZANA THE WILD GIRL (1969)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


I still remember seeing this film advertised back in The Day, but I never saw it in the theaters. Something Weird preserved it, and I finally saw it via a Youtube download, confirming my suspicion that it would have been a stone bore in a theater, despite the copious upper-body nudity of the title character (played by one Femi Benussi).

Jungle girls tend to fall into two broad (so to speak) categories: the tough babes and the innocent sylphs. The Italian film-industry tended to make the latter, like the slightly earlier LUANA, though I did wonder if the filmmakers would lean more toward the former pattern, since they'd bothered to rip off the name of the seminal "tough jungle hero." However, such was not the case.

TARZANA is an absolutely by-the-numbers exercise in "jungle rot." A little white girl, the offspring of an English lord, is lost in the African jungle. Fifteen years later, the lord hears reports of a mysterious white girl living in the wilds, and suspects that it may be his lost daughter. Thus he funds an expedition to go looking for the mystery lady.

Often expeditions of white adventurers encounter a lot of opposition from both wild animals and hostile native tribes. TARZANA doesn't bother even coming up to the meager level of LUANA's entertainments, as the former depends a lot of stock footage. Thus the film hardly finds time for any battles between the expedition and the local wildlife. What passes for conflict is that, while some of the adventurers sincerely want to bring Tarzana back to civilization and her grandfather, others want to capture the wild girl for exhibition and profit.

Like Luana, Tarzana never speaks, and so it's never clear as to how she survived in the jungle sans help from local natives. She also seems to have acquired some influence over some of the usual animals-- monkeys, elephants-- and though she shows no talent for fighting, she does at one point send some elephants around to stomp the adventurers' camp. Had this scene been the climax of the film, I might have judged it a combative adventure. However, the end-sequence is mostly about two of the good people managing to approach Tarzana-- despite her having been hit with a trank-date by bad guys-- and to remind her of her forgotten past by showing the girl a doll she once owned. It's a paltry form of drama, but said climax, as well as the movie's endless small talk, pushes this one more toward the mythos of the drama.

Benussi's nudity has some appeal, but the film's main interest for me is that I wondered how it was ever exhibited in America, given that the "Tarzan" trademark has been aggressively protected by the heirs of Edgar Rice Burroughs.