Tarzan and the Trappers

Gordon Scott has a truly magnificent physique ("lucky Jane!" is all I can say), and is an excellent brawler, but his acrobatic ability is questionable at best: nearly all of his vine-swinging is filmed in long shots and appears to be stunt-doubled. Eve Brent is a stunning Jane, but she's barely in the film. The story itself is generic. ** out of 4.

This Tarzan feature from the Gordon Scott series has just enough to make it watchable if you like the series in general. Scott definitely looks like Tarzan, and he has enough of a screen presence to be believable, but his wooden acting style takes the energy out of some of the scenes. The story has a few good moments, but at other times the characters and situations are just too unimaginative not to be noticeable.

The story does have a fair amount of action, as Tarzan must first battle a greedy but rather foolish trapper, and then face the trapper's more malicious brother plus a treacherous jungle trader. Plenty of outdoor footage and scenes of African animals are worked in with the studio shots, and most of the time this helps to mask the low production values. 'Cheta', in fact, gets some of the best moments of the movie.

So many Tarzan movies had been made before this one that it must have been hard to come up with new ideas. This one does at least have a worthwhile idea behind the plot, but it is otherwise rather uninspired in the way that it tells the story.

TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS (1958 B&W) features Gordon Scott as Tarzan. This is a mediocre jungle adventure edited together from two or three episodes of a TV series that never surfaced. Gordon Scott plays a great muscular Tarzan but, as another Amazon reviewer noted, the film is compressed in such a way that the images are out of proportion. For example, Gordon Scott appears almost short and stout, albeit muscular. I know this isn't true because I just saw another Scott Tarzan film ("Tarzan and the Lost Safari" from 1957) wherein Scott is tall (6'3") and his waist is incredibly lean. In any event, although this is far from the best Gordon Scott Tarzan picture (his "Tarzan's Greatest Adventure" from 1959 is one of the best films in the entire series), "Tarzan and the Trappers" is well worth watching if for no other reason than to feast your eyes on the awe-inspiring voluptuousness of Eve Brent, who plays "Jane."

GRADE: C

Gordon Scott made some good Tarzan movies, but this is not one of them.

As I watched it, wincing at the bad, obviously interior sets and the hollow wooden "clonking" sounds as they walked across supposedly dirt trails, and cringing at the bad dialog and worse acting among the supporting cast, I kept thinking, "Sheesh! This is TV show level!" Then I find out it was, indeed, three TV show pilot episodes woven seam-fully into one.

It's nice to see Scott get outside (alone), away from the lame sets, in a few of the scenes; and the fights do have some pretty nice moves... but oh, ow, and ouch as to the dialog. And did I mention the acting? Heck, Cheetah (or "Cheta," in this version) was a better actor than most of the humans.

And that's not saying much.

It is kind of a stitch to see a younger Sherman (i.e. Scatman) Carothers acting as a native. But probably not worth the overall time-investment.

The Tarzan you grow up is likely to always be "your" Tarzan, so for the generation which came of age in the 1950s, that means Gordon Scott. He might not have been the best Tarzan, (that's always a matter of debate), but he was certainly a good one. His "Tarzan and the Trappers" is a minor work, apparently stitched together from some TV episodes, but it demonstrates how the Tarzan character reflects the changing moods of the times.

In this case, the times are the Eisenhower Years and so Tarzan, Jane, and Boy come across here as a typical suburban family not that far removed from, say, "Ozzie and Harriet." Of course, the father in this particular family seems to speak with a third-grade education and he must spend an awful lot of time in the gym, but these are minor points.

"Tarzan and the Trappers" also reflects the prudish morality of the 1950s. Tarzan and Jane, for example, seem to have two side-by-side but separate treehouses which allows for "proper" sleeping arrangements. Care has also been taken to downplay Tarzan's sexuality, moving him away from his powerful masculinity toward a tamer, almost neutered status. Gordon Scott's loincloth, for instance, rides high enough on his torso to completely hide his navel, which must have caused some problems during filming. ("Sorry, Gordon, you'll have to do it again. We saw your belly button.") And in that inevitable scene in which Tarzan is captured and put into bondage, his arms stretched up and tied high above his head, we see that Gordon Scott's armpits have been carefully shaved. Apparently male body hair, either on the chest or in the armpits, was a "no no" because it emphasized the actor's sexual nature. Despite these efforts to "housebreak" and "domesticate" Tarzan, however, Gordon Scott still manages to exude an undeniable appeal and for us Eisenhower kids, he'll always be "our" Tarzan.