Propaganda efforts aimed at making people sacrifice themselves for grand causes have recently lost much of their previous subtlety. Such crudeness has not been observed, at least not in what passes for the Western world, since the Second World War. In those times, propaganda even engulfed what was supposed to be the epitome of escapist entertainment – family-friendly adventure films. One example can be found in Tarzan Triumphs, a 1943 film directed by William Thiele and the seventh instalment of the series starring Johnny Weissmuller.
The plot begins with Tarzan (played by Johnny Weissmuller) and his adopted son, Boy (played by Johnny Sheffield), commenting on a letter from Tarzan’s companion Jane, who has left Tarzan’s idyllic jungle kingdom for London to tend to her sick mother. The letter mentions the large war currently being waged against the German Nazis. Tarzan, always wary of interactions with the outside world, does not want to be part of it, but things change when a unit of German paratroopers, led by Colonel von Reichert (played by Stanley Ridgers), is dropped into his area of Africa. Their aim is the region around the lost city of Palandria, which is rich in natural resources that they try to exploit for the German war effort.
Lieutenant Reinhardt Schmitt (played by Rex Williams), the unit’s radio operator, is separated from the rest of his unit and is picked up and nursed back to health by Tarzan. Schmitt, who claims to be an Englishman named “Sheldon”, desperately tries to power up his radio station, constantly thwarted by the antics of the chimpanzee Cheeta. Meanwhile, von Reichert treacherously takes over Palandria and forces its inhabitants to work as slave labour, building mines and an airfield. Zandra (played by Frances Gifford), the Palandrian princess, escapes the city and asks Tarzan for help. Tarzan is at first reluctant but changes his mind when the Nazis start threatening Boy’s life.
Tarzan Triumphs is a direct sequel to the previous film Tarzan’s New York Adventure, but it is also the first part of what some critics and scholars call a new series of Tarzan films. MGM, the studio that made the previous six films, decided to sell the film rights to producer Sol Lesser, who in the 1930s made his own rival Tarzan films. One reason for that decision was Maureen O’Sullivan’s choice to discontinue playing the character of Jane, whose absence is conveniently explained at the beginning of this film. Lesser made his film through RKO Pictures, a studio that provided him with a significantly smaller budget than MGM had invested before. However, if the question was whether the series could survive in new circumstances, the answer was a resounding “yes”. Much of this has to do with the film being made months after America’s entry into the Second World War and the film both stirring and exploiting jingoistic sentiments of the public.
The Nazis are portrayed as absolutely evil – deceitful creatures who exploit the kindness and hospitality of both Tarzan and Palandria. The script by Carroll Young and Roy Chanslor even explicitly describes Tarzan’s initial reluctance to fight the Nazis as “isolationist”, a clear reference to Americans’ reluctance to get involved in the war before being taught a painful lesson at Pearl Harbor. When the protagonist changes his mind and says “Now, Tarzan make war”, it is one of the memorable dialogue lines in the entire series and probably caused massive cheers among audiences in 1940s cinemas. Tarzan’s Nazi opponents are all killed in the film in various ways, ranging from being speared, knifed, eaten by piranha-like “cannibal fish”, or mauled by lions. Despite Tarzan’s long-standing dislike of guns, they are used to kill Nazis not only by Boy, but also by Cheeta. His last scene, in which his inarticulate screams over the radio are mistaken for Hitler’s voice by top Nazi generals in Berlin, might have looked “cool” in the 1940s, but now looks like overkill.
When the propaganda is taken out of the equation, Tarzan Triumphs is quite a decent adventure film. It is rather short, made on locations in California’s Sherwood Forest and in RKO studios, which give an adequate representation of an exotic lost city. An ancient civilisation hidden within the African jungle – one of the most popular motifs of early‑20th‑century adventure fiction – is a refreshing addition to the series. This is also an excuse for Tarzan to interact with a local population that is white instead of black, thus depriving the film of any racist connotations and possible controversies that wartime America did not need. However, the idea of replacing Jane with a new companion for Tarzan in the form of Zandra did not work out, because Frances Gifford, despite her experience playing a slightly similar character, Nyoka, in the Jungle Girl film serial, lacked proper chemistry with Weissmuller. William Thiele, an Austrian Jew who emigrated to Hollywood to escape the Nazis, directed the film well. He would do the same work only in the similarly‑themed sequel Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, released a few months later.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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