La rivincita di Tarzan

The Reeds, a family of American zoo owners arrive in Africa in order to collect animals for their zoo. Patriarch Roger Reed is relishing the adventure while his wife is constantly having sneezing fits. Their daughter Eleanor is being targeted by an evil sheik who wants to add her to his collection of wives. He bribes their safari guide Olaf to lead them to a trap where he will kidnap her. But he hasn't reckoned on Tarzan, who is keeping an eye on the Reeds & is in love with her, causing complications between him & Eleanor's trigger-happy fiancée Nevin Potter, who is intent on killing as many animals as he can.

After MGM had made their three Tarzan adaptations, Twentieth Century Fox decided to give Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs a better deal & got the rights in return. But they couldn't get Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who played Tarzan in the MGM films & who was a former Olympic swimming champ, so they recruited 1936 decathlon champ Glenn Morris for the lead role. They also cast another swimming champ, Eleanor Holm, for the love interest.

The film is a rather goofy but passably entertaining Tarzan flick with some humour directed at the inept safari & some reasonable fight scenes & Tarzan grappling with lions & natives. Of course, some of the elements in the script have dated badly but Tarzan's Revenge is not too bad & does a fair job of giving some jungle escapism. Glenn Morris could manage the physical requirements of the role (he looked pretty good swinging on the vines in some scenes & is a good swimmer) but the public preferred Weissmuller so Morris' involvement in the franchise ended after this, his only turn as Tarzan. The other actors acquit themselves fairly although C. Henry Gordon's evil sheik is strictly one-dimensional & cardboard in nature.