Dr Hermes Reviews - TARZAN Other Authors

TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD

(Nov 11, 2001)

From April 1966, this is that rarity, a novelization of a screenplay (which was by Clair Hufaker) that is more detailed, credible and thoughtful than the movie itself. Fritz Leiber at first seems like an odd choice for this project (his later works dwelled increasingly on cute wordplay and baroque images) but I have to admit that I had forgotten what a masterful wordsmith he really was. Leiber has stated many times how much he enjoyed the pulps and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it shows here that he has given a lot of thought to the Tarzan character.

Leiber's version of Tarzan is a good deal like Philip Jose Farmer's, only more virtuous and likeable. Well educated and sophisticated, he travels by jet with a letter of authority from Queen Elizabeth in his billfold, but he's more at home sharing at meal of raw peccary with the lion Major. We follow the Apeman's thoughts on many subjects, especially the nature of violence, and Leiber avoids the preachy little sermons Burroughs sometimes threw in.

It's interesting that when the Apeman strips off his light tweed suit and appears in loincloth, he suddenly becomes a bit frightening. "In putting off his clothes, he seemed to have become taller and at the same time brawnier and leaner, while his face had grown graver and harder..." His mannerisms change also as he beomes his truer self. One of his friends says, "You don't look like the same man at all."
 
The animal language that Burroughs devised (where 'numa' means lion) is described here as growls, grunts and rumblings rather than actual spoken words. The fact that a jaguar in Brazil responds to the African "vando sheeta" impresses Tarzan, who thinks, "Yes, it must be deeper than what human beings call language, as I've always thought.' There is also one very intriguing comment that "only a Neanderthal among men" would have understood this..there's something to think about.

 The only real criticism I have of this book is that there is just too much travelogue and historical background about Brazil in the first half. Characters launch into detailed speeches with dates and names that read as if cut and pasted out of a textbook. At 316 pages, VALLEY OF GOLD would have benefitted from some judicious trimming.

 Leiber goes to some lengths to explain exctly
what kind of a megalomaniac Augustus Vinaro is. More than the standard James Bond-villain, Vinaro has an elaborate religion of Death worship that slowly reveals his increasing insanity. The precarious relationship with his captive girlfriend is believably ominous as she tries to cope with his touchy genius. The exploding jewelry (a simple visual gimmick in the movie) is given deep symbolic meaning here.

A touch I really enjoyed is that whenever Tarzan reflects on one of his past adventures, a footnote mentions the Burroughs book in which it happened. VALLEY OF GOLD doesn't go into the earlier stories in detail but the frequent (and accurate) references really help to convince that this is in fact Tarzan. And it is very satisfying that even TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN is mentioned as a past event, not dismissed as apocryphal. As when the Apeman casually says he has discovered living dinosaurs in Pal-Ul-Don, the statement simply stands for itself.

There are quite a few similarities between Tarzan and Doc Savage here, other than the constant references to "the bronzed giant". Although the Apeman is an expert shot and guns are one of his hobbies (!), he has a strong compulsion not to use a gun in a real fight and his reasoning is reminiscent of Doc's. "...he detested the way such guns made people rely on their machines and armies, not on the strength of their own bodies...and on the wit of their own minds." Far away, on the 86th floor, a voice says, "You've got that right."

There is much more in this book worth noting, including the idea that Tarzan himself is not certain why he has stayed young for so long, or how long it will continue to last. But the main point is that TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD is well-crafted and thought out, thoroughly entertaining and deserving of more attention that it has gotten. I have only once actually seen a copy in a lifetime spent haunting used bookstores and local libraries, and it's a shame that this adventure is not kept in print.

"Valley of Gold, Valley of the Vanished" (Aug 4, 2001) Well. While re-reading the Doc Savage book THE GOLDEN PERIL recently, I was reminded strongly of the 1966 film TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD and dusted off the tape for a viewing. The movie itself is enjoyable Saturday afternoon fun, if not a classic, but the similarities to Doc's mythology are worth noting. Tarzan is called by the Mexican authorities to help a mysterious young boy find his lost city, and to prevent the vile mastermind Vinaro from slaughtering the primitive peoples of that city to loot their gold. (Sound familiar?) As the tanks and helicopters make their way toward Tucumai, Tarzan races to the rescue. Now this movie was released in 1966. The Bantam reprints had been going strong for two years, and there was talk of making that Doc movie THE THOUSAND-HEADED MAN with Chuck Connors. So it is possible that Hollywood screenwriters and producers had the Man of Bronze in mind when they planned this film, but there's no way to tell. A much bigger sensation at the time were the first three James Bond movies. Today, it's hard to realize just how popular 007 was then, but TV and movie theatres were packed full of Bond imitations. The beginning of VALLEY OF GOLD has Tarzan in a tan business suit, being flown into Mexico City in a helicopter to be briefed on his mission. Even the cheesy jazz music over the pop art credits had a Bond feel. It certainly would have been possible to have produced this movie as a Doc Savage film. Mike Henry is as physically impressive as anyone could ask, muscular as a Bama painting. His acting is a bit stiff but not hopeless, and he would have been an okay choice to play Doc. The city (shot in the actual ruins of Teotihuacan) was presented as a surviving Incan civilization, not Mayan but the genuine setting was a real plus. And the movie's villain meets such a poetically fitting death, suffocated in a pile of the gold dust he coveted, that it would have fit right into a Doc story. There is one very suggestive line, when the Incan leader Manco Cupac explains his speaking English is because of an explorer from the outside world who entered their valley in the chief's lifetime. Hmmm...was this outsider's name Clark Savage Sr and did he mention ambitious plans for raising a son? Guess we'll never know. TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD was also published in novel form by the great Fritz Leiber, the first time a writer other than Edgar rice Burroughs was allowed to do a book with the Ape Man. At 317 pages, the book deserves a thorough review someday. Leiber modifies his usual playful style, telling a headlong adventure tale that is more complex and sophisticated than the movie. I especially enjoyed the way Lieber sprinkled many references to Tarzan's classic ERB adventures, and the way he speculated on the Ape Man's longevity. It's too bad this book is so hard to find.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE PEERLESS PEER (Oct 23, 2001)          From 1974, this is one of Philip Jose Farmer's better efforts relating his interpretation of classic pulp characters. At only 127 pages long, it moves briskly enough, with none of the lengthy, standstill digressions that kept ESCAPE FROM LOKI from having any momentum. Farmer has toned down the sexual and scatological details quite a bit, and although he presents his own theories on the vintage heroes, he doesn't bog the story down with long exposition. In fact, this book is breezy, rather lighthearted and more fun than most of his pulp-related stories.            The book was first published in 1974, with a Dell paperback two years later. Although the name "Tarzan" is carefully never used, the identity of the "peerless peer of the title, Greystoke, Lord of the Jungle, is overwhelmingly evident. It's widely believed that the Burroughs estate pounced on this unauthorized use of its prize character and demanded that the book be withdrawn from circulation and kept out of print. I haven't seen any actual documented evidence of this, but it is true that Farmer re-wrote the story into "The Three Madmen" (reprinted in THE GRAND ADVENTURE), substituting an adult Mowgli for Tarzan. In many ways, the revised story is an improvement.                  The main stars are an elderly Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H Watson, still being called to serve their country in the dark days of 1916, sent to track down the escaped German spy Von Bork (from the canonical Holmes story, "His Last Bow." Farmer gets the pair from Baker Street pretty much in character, perhaps a bit more snappish and sarcastic, as enduring the rigors of trans-Atlantic adventure at their age is no treat. Holmes and Watson encounter half a dozen of the great heroes of adventure fiction in their struggles across east Africa, and this is where the real delights of this story lie.              Some of the characters make only a brief cameo of a spoken sentence or a short paragraph-- Dr Gideon Fell and a very young Sir Henry Merrivale, for example. Mycroft Holmes is on stage long enough to send Holmes and Watson on their mission.              On their journey to Africa, they are pilotted by two very strange Americans. One is a handsome young gray-eyed fellow named Wentworth, who is clearly G-8. Fighting off a German attack in midflight, Wentworth suffers a violently hallucinatory attack, thinking he is fighting giant cockroaches crawling all over the plane, and after landing, he's wrestled into a straightjacket and carried off raving. Now, certainly fans of G-8, an established pulp hero with long and healthy sales of his own title, may not warm up to this presentation. It's like saying James Bond only daydreamed he got all those beautiful women and his enemies were ordinary thugs. Feh. On the other hand, G-8's later adventures did get wildly over the top, featuring skeleton aviators, flying gorillas, leopard-headed men and much worse. So you can see Farmer's point.            Holmes and Watson also have to deal with 'Kentov', late of the Czar's espionage service. Wearing "a long black opera cloak" and "a big black slouch hat", Kentov has a strange way of abruptly appearing and disappearing without seeming to use the door. Watson notes his own mind gets foggy when the man appears and he always jumps violently as the effect clears. Even Holmes shouts, "Confound it, man! Couldn't you behave like a civilised being for once and knock before entering?"            Although not as hysterical as Wentworth, the Shadow gets into similar distress by landing their plane on a zeppelin and invading it. In the furious fighting which follows, we last see the man in black falling through the fabric of the airship, a gun blasting away in each fist, laughing maniacally. Watson reflects that "since he was wearing a parachute, he may have survived."              We also explore the hidden land and fierce warriors of the Zu-Vendis, from an Allan Quatermain novel by H Rider Haggard. But most of THE PEERLESS PEAR is taken up with Holmes and Watson trying to make terms with Tarzan himself. Farmer presents the Apeman quite faithfully to Burrough's original interpretation, with the exception of a complicated fraud that Tarzan pulled when he assumed the Greystoke titles. Holmes deduces this and in effect blackmails Tarzan into a payment of sixty thousand pounds to keep silent. That takes nerve! The Great Detective sweats as the Apeman fingers his long knife thoughtfully, but the deal is struck.          There is a brief moment where Farmer shows such real affection and respect for these characters that it makes up for some of his transgressions. Watson has fallen for a young blonde held by the Zu-Vendis and he pleads for Tarzan to help rescue her. The doctor says he will waive his half of Holmes' fee (that is, bribe). Greystoke laughs and replies, "I couldn't refuse a man who loves love more than he loves money. And you can keep the fee."            Unfortunately, the story collapses into inplausible farce at the end. Threatened by deadly bees and Zu-Vendi warriors, the elderly Holmes strips naked and paints himself with stripes, then cavorts in an approximation of the bee's communication dance, using his lense to imitate their signals....oh, I can't go on. It's dreadful. And the final pun in the closing paragraph is simply atrocious. Still, for most of the story, this is enjoyable and well worth seeking out.

THE THREE MADMEN (Oct 24, 2001)                      From 1984, this is the revised version of Philip Jose Farmer's 1974 book THE ADVENTURE OF THE PEERLESS PEER, where Holmes and Watson team up with Tarzan during World War I. The Burroughs estate was not flattered by the unauthorized use of the Apeman, and the book was withdrawn from circulation. THE THREE MADMEN was included in Farmer's anthology THE GRAND ADVENTURE, possibly revised to salvage a story he liked and didn't want to see vanish into trademark limbo. It was also printed in THE MISADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (Citadel Press, 1989). a collection of exceedingly apocryphal Baker Street parodies and pastiches (most of which are pretty lame). "The Three Madmen" of the title, by the way, would be G-8, the Shadow and Mowgli.                THE THREE MADMEN has not been extensively polished or revised-- except for substituting Mowgli for Tarzan, and the pointless introduction of a screeching countess turned actress, it is the same book. Still, Farmer's treatment of Mowgli deserves some consideration.          Because of the 1967 Disney animated version of THE JUNGLE BOOK, along with its sequels and immense merchandising, most people probably think of Mowgli as a small boy. However only part of the original stories were about his childhood. The 1994 movie starring Jason Scott Lee presents the Mowgli we find in this book - a strange, poignant, unpredictable outsider. Even more than Tarzan, he is between two worlds and really belonging to neither. He is also extremely dangerous.          Despite Holmes' insistence that cobras are completely deaf, we do see Mowgli talk one of the snakes out of attacking. He says he explained to the cobra that "she was under no obligation to the Law of the Jungle to attack you." To get the Wolf-man from his own turf in central India and into Africa (to keep the original story intact and avoid a massive rewrite), Farmer explains that Mowgli is a British officer on leave to film a silent movie of his life, MOWGLI'S REVENGE.              What is really odd is that Farmer declares flatly that there was no real Mowgli, that Kipling's book was completely fictional, and that jungle man they are dealing with is an imposter who has gotten lost so deeply into the role that he actually believes he IS Mowgli. However, some small part of his consciousness is still aware of the truth and any doubt cast on his identity enrages him. As in the previous version of this book, Holmes arranges to be hired to investigate Mowgli's past thoroughly-- ostensibly, this is to establish the Wolf-man's claim but they both know it's actually a bribe to Holmes to keep him quiet. (Conan Doyle's Holmes actually was not above cutting a deal like this, if it hurt no one. The canonical Holmes answered to his own sense of right and wrong, not the exact statutes of law.)              Farmer also explains that Mowgli had been adopted by Sir Jametsee Jejeebhoy, and had inherited a fortune, part of which he spent finagling an English baronetcy. It strikes me that we have a character here who would have done very well with a pulp series of his own. An English peer who was an Indian Parsi, raised by wolves in the jungle, speaking with animals and superhuman in strength and agility-- his adventures around the British Empire between the World Wars could have been fascinating. And the added touch that he was in fact a fraud who couldn't bear to be exposed would add an ominous uncertainty to the whole situation. Somewhere the realm of unwritten books, there are a dozen copies of the 1930s pulp MOWGLI THE WOLF-MAN.

THE DARK HEART OF TIME (Oct 4, 2002) From June 1999, this is the book that Philip Jose Farmer had been thinking about writing all his life. It's the first all-new Tarzan novel authorized by the Burroughs estate since Fritz Leiber's TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD in 1966,and it seems likely that permission was given to go ahead with this book as part of the massive tie-ins with Disney's animated feature. It's pretty good, with almost non-stop action and all the classic Burroughs ingredients thrown into the mix. Unfortunately, it never seems to build up much momentum or sense of the story getting anywhere, and it falls apart badly toward the end. And it really is a bit too long to sustain any feeling of urgency.Some of the repeated flood scenes could have been trimmed to good result. The book takes place in between TARZAN THE UNTAMED and TARZAN THE TERRIBLE (incidentally, two of my favorite books in the series), where Tarzan is searching for his wife Jane, whom he thought had been killed but who was actually a prisoner of those vile Huns. In TARZAN THE UNTAMED, Burroughs threw in a very odd, tantalizing little episode where the Apeman finds an ancient skeleton in the desert, clad in scraps of armor, with a map to a lost city in a metal cylinder. For some reason, the author never returned to this hint or explained it further. You can tell this little mystery was bugging Farmer for years and I'm glad he finally got to tell the story himself. Even though he keeps trying to get back to his search for Jane, Tarzan repeatedly becomes sidetracked and delayed in this book. It's not bad enough he's the quarry of a safari organized to track him down and bring him as a prisoner to a sinister American millionaire (the white hunters and their native crew are all plotting to kill each other when feasible, in the best Burroughs tradition). The expedition hunting the Apeman has a strange nonhuman tracker, whose sense of smell and physical abilities match those of Tarzan himself. This is Rahb, the black-furred bearman, last male of his kind, forced to pursue Tarzan because his own pregnant mate is being held hostage to coerce him. Rahb never quite comes to life for me. I couldn't visualize him or picture a bearlike creature hurtling through the trees. Maybe if Rahb had been a different variety of Mangani, it might have been more convincing. Tarzan suffers hugely in this story, surviving injuries that would put most normal men on life support. He falls hundreds of feet through tree branches (twice), survives earthquakes and floods, comes up against enemies ranging from wild beasts to big game hunters to several different vicious native tribes, and he always shakes himself and gets back up again. The Apeman deserves to be ranked with the greatest escape artists in heroic fiction, based on the deadly traps he gets out off in this book alone. (In a deep pit, after barely avoiding landing on a sharpened stake himself, Tarzan looks up and sees a leopard about to pounce. Never at a loss, our hero jumps up and yanks the big cat down onto the stake. This is one of his easiest challenges... some of the others are so seemingly hopeless that I literally could not imagine what the Apeman was going to try.) Most of the story details running and being captured and fighting and trying to survive, all vey appropriate for the character. The glimpses of the millionaire waiting impatiently for Tarzan to be brought back to him are intriguing. But once our hero and his two companions enter the City Made By God, and get involved with a high priestess allegedly descended from extraterrestrials, not to mention the crystal tree that connects all Time and Space, the narrative slows and gets all tangled up in its profound thoughts. Even the huge starspawn Ghost Frog (who yanks an elephant's trunk off, how rude) can't quite get things rolling again. And enough already with this immortality stuff driving every single story, Phil. At this point, Tarzan is only thirty years old, there's no reason for him or anyone else to think he's immortal and to decide to get the secret from him! This is really stretching a recurring theme, and it hurts the book. If it took place today, with Tarzan mysteriously looking young while being over a hundred, that would make sense. But not in 1918. There were plenty of other reasons for villains to be after the Apeman... the location of Opar being the most obvious. If you were a Tarzan fan who was put off by Lord Grandrith in LORD OF THE TREES or even (*eek*) A FEAST UNKNOWN, rest assured that here Farmer treats the genuine hero respectfully and vividly. He has obviously spent a great deal of time brooding over the character. There is nothing here which directly contradicts anything in Burroughs' canon, and Farmer expands on it in thought-provoking ways. He reflects that because of his extraordinary upbringing he is not really a human or an ape, but something unique. ("Some, less inclined to hyperbole, said that he was a unique and remarkable phenomenon. Of all the many millions of various forms that life had produced during millions of years, it had produced only one Tarzan....He was a species by himself." I love that insight.) previous page Powered by MSN TV next page