And now we have a revisionist Tarzan. Hugh Hudson, the TV-commercial director who rose to cinematic fame with the handsome but hollow Chariots of Fire, is back with Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Out of that much title you should be able to get three separate movies, and the film indeed feels like two or three different movies cut up and tossed together, let the clips fall where they may. The script is by P. H. Vazak—a pseudonym for Robert Towne, the original writer, an American—and Michael Austin, presumably an Englishman and palpably ineffectual.
Towne is known chiefly for Chinatown, an updated film noir—which is to say The Big Sleep with extra sex and significance—and here he seems to have aimed at showing that nature, though red in tooth and claw, is still preferable to true blue Old England, i.e., civilization, which is not only cruel but also mean-spirited and hypocritical and socially unjust. What the finished film is saying, however, is not readily scrutable, partly because too many cooks may have cooked its goose, and partly because it was obviously a much longer film cut down to something that, though still lengthy, has lost its continuity and coherence.
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