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Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1949); Paging Johnny Weismueller
Topic Started: Jul 7 2011, 07:15 PM (689 Views)
Inspector Carr
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Caught this last Saturday Morning on TCM........I had a hard time sitting through this one......Lex Barker come off as a dim bulb.......too much chimpanzee humor.......boring.......Although Johnny Weismueller was not the worlds greatest actor.........His Tarzan loin cloth is still difficult to fill.....
"Life is a Crapshoot however you need a pair of dice to participate"
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panzer the great & terrible
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Lex Barker was a bastard all the way: bad actor, bad person, if you believe what's in print, and I do.
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jul 8 2011, 10:05 AM.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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CliffClaven
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(Insert joke about Lex's Magic Fountain)
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Laughing Gravy
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Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1949) Dir. Lee Sholem

After a decade and a half, with Johnny Weissmuller retired from the role, Tarzan needed to fill his empty loincloth. Producer Sol Lesser and director Lee Sholem, after an extensive search, settled on 6 ft. 3, 200 lbs. Lex Barker. Brenda Joyce returned for her final stint as Jane (Lex's five Tarzan pictures would feature five different Janes; make of that as you will) and Elmo Lincoln has an uncredited cameo.

After twenty years, lost aviatrix Evelyn Ankers is needed to testify in a murder trial. Is she still alive? Tarzan knows, and fetches her: she's living in a lost city of the jungle that boasts a fountain of youth, so she still looks only 25. Naturally, despicable characters (led by Albert Dekker) want to find that fountain, and will threaten Jane to get Tarzan to spill his jungle beans. One of the lost citizens, Henry Brandon, decides the way to settle all the drama is to stick Tarzan with a flaming arrow, which would hurt. A lot. Oh, and Cheeta and friends are up to their usual hijinx, naturally. This is a family show.

Frankly, I wasn't expecting much, but the Curt Siodmak script keeps things moving along briskly and the film - with a lot of matte paintings that are almost surely retreads from King Kong - looks more polished than I remember the earlier RKO Tarzans being. Lex is, well, Tarzan enough to suit my Ape Man needs. (And speaks without pronouns. And says "Umgawa." And gives the Weissmuller yell when it suits him.) Brenda? In worst Jane tradition, she's annoying and should really not be so feisty where Tarzan's concerned. She no sooner boasts that she can find her way around the jungle as well as her husband can than she blunders into a pit that quickly fills with water. Sheesh. I miss Boy, too, in a way. The Shangri-La guys wear matching leopardskin undies and sweatbands. They look very appealing. Alan Napier is, of all things, Evelyn Anker's long-lost boyfriend.

I liked this movie a lot. These later Tarzan pictures (if you can call 1949 "later") are entertaining matinee fodder. Tarzan's Magic Fountain (which was filmed under the way-more-accurate title Tarzan and the Arrow of Death) is available from the Warner Archive in a stellar print.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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Fedora
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I really connected with the Lex Barker Tarzans
Maybe it was the 50s post war 'new wave' but I felt it was a case of RKO knowing the market and targeting it well
Interestingly it coincided with a pretty good standalone 30 minute radio series, voiced with considerable authority by Lamont Johnson - he had a good voice for radio and obviously sat well in a director's chair as he helmed several memorable TV miniseries in the 1980s. He also directed the cult George Peppard starrer: The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972)
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