Original subtitles

(upbeat music)

- Hi, this is Ed Hulse again.

I'm a film historian and a journalist,

and a big Tarzan fan, and a big serial fan

which is why The Film Detective

has asked me to do the commentaries for both this film

and the "New Adventures Of Tarzan”, the complete serial.

I hope you're enjoying them.

I'm gonna assume that you've seen this film already

and that you've decided

to listen to my commentary afterwards.

So the first thing I have to explain to you is that,

this is actually not a true feature version

of the 1922 serial.

Itis really a compilation of odd reels

that happened to include the final chapter.

They were offered for sale many years ago,

they were found, copied and put together

with these new titles that you're seeing now,

which are explaining the plot.

When we get to the live action footage,

what you're gonna see at first is really

about several chapters into the serial,

probably five or six chapters into the serial.

Now as I say, this is a very elaborate production

at the time, it is a serial,

in 15 chapters, that production began, I believe in 1921.

Now here you can see the title sequence there,

you see the art behind it, the forest.

I want you to remember that because that proves

that this is from the original 1921 release of this serial.

Now, why do I say that, why is that important?

Because this film,

"The Adventures Of Tarzan" was re-released theatrically

in 1929, with the original 15 chapters

cut down to 10 chapters.

And the design of the titles,

the dialogue titles and the text titles are important

because in the 1929 version,

they were done in a different type style

and they were done against a plain black background.

See that photo of the jungle there,

you wouldn't see that if this footage had been taken

from the 1929 reissue.

Both versions of course,

were distributed by the Weiss Brothers.

They were a group, a poverty row group, very prolific,

and like many of the people of their era,

they began in the business in the early silent days.

So really it's three siblings, Adolph, Max, and Louis Weiss.

They were born to Hungarian immigrants

who arrived in America in 1883

and took up residence in New York City.

Adolph, he was the oldest

and the most entrepreneurial oriented of the siblings.

He began his career selling lamps and light bulbs

and electrical fixtures in a store

on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.

In 1900, at the age of 21,

he kind of graduated to selling phonographs

and other electrical machines that were licensed

from both the Edison and the Victor companies.

Now he had his own business and he employed his brothers,

Max and Lewis, the latter was still a school boy

when he started working for Adolph.

Now, as a result of his business relationship

with Thomas Edison and The Edison Company,

Adolph became interested in the motion picture business

and he opened up as kind of a side business,

a storefront Nickelodeon theater in 1907.

And it turned out to be very profitable.

And within a few years,

he owned 16 theaters scattered throughout

the greater New York area, Long Island, New Jersey

and Connecticut.

So Max and Lewis helped run the chain,

while the younger brother also dealt

with independent exchanges.

Exchanges where these distribution branches

that would give prints to the, or rent prints

to local theaters.

And so he learned a great deal,

Lewis Weiss about the distribution end of the business.

Now like many of the other exhibitors of that time,

the Weiss Brothers soon realized that the big money

was in production.

Because if you produced your own films,

you weren't paying a licensing fee as a distributor.

So you were there for keeping all the profits.

You didn't have to return money

to the people who produced the movie.

Now, let me interrupt for a second

to explain what you're seeing here.

There's several chapters in there's Elmo Lincoln as Tarzan.

There's his Jane, who was Louise Lorraine.

Elmo and Louise, as I'll tell you shortly,

had already worked together several times.

They are the stars of this production.

And this was by and large produced in Southern California,

around Hollywood, with some desert scenes that were shot

around Yuma, Arizona.

And there, of course is one of the incredibly

phony looking ape suits.

And this film Tarzan interacts with both

real chimpanzees and Orangutan,

and these guys in these actors in ape costumes.

So anyway, getting back to the Weiss Brothers.

In 1915, they incorporated a company called

Clarion Photo Plays.

The intent of which was not originally to produce,

but to acquire feature films that had already been made

and market them via what was known

as the state rights method.

Now, as I explain in the

“New Adventures Of Tarzan" commentary.

State rights involved, these independent sub distributors

who had specific territories,

usually they were individual states,

but some territories bled over into other states,

especially in the Western half of the country,

where there were fewer theaters to begin with.

So if you didn't have your own network of exchanges

or branch offices in the big cities,

which the major studios did,

you had to rely on the state rights method

to get your film picked up and distributed

on a national basis.

So their company Clarion's their first and only real hit

was a movie called "It May Be Your Daughter,”

which was made in 1916.

It was kind of a sensational white slave melodrama

produced by a group called,

"The Moral Uplift Society of America.”

How's that for a name?

And more importantly,

it was written by a guy named George M Merrick,

with whom the Weiss Brothers would be aligned for the next,

literally for the next several decades,

three or four decades, going into the early TV years.

Merrick was kind of a jack-of-all-trades.

He did some writing, he did some producing,

he was a production manager.

He was one of these guys who knew the business

from the ground the up.

So anyway, with the profits from "It May Be Your Daughter”,

Adolph and his brothers organized

what was then called the Art Class Pictures Corporation,

which was kind of like a parent company,

an umbrella company under which there were several offshoots

that were later formed of different names.

Now this kind of strategy by the way,

was not unique to the Weiss Brothers.

Early motion picture history is littered with entrepreneurs

who founded multiple subsidiary companies

to handle in individual projects.

Whether they were films that were being made,

films that were acquired for distribution,

films that had already gone through distribution once

and were being re-released several years later,

sometimes with the addition of newly shot footage,

it was easy to establish all these different companies

in those days and it was a very practical reason

for doing so because it then limited

the parent company's liability if heavy losses were incurred

or if lawsuits were threatened.

Now, by the way, here's Universal backlot.

This set here, this street was likely constructed in 1920

for a big Universal movie called "The Virgin of Stamboul.”

It might also have been constructed slightly later

for another film called "Under Two Flags”.

But it was clearly a street of Arabian character

and it fits into this part of the Tarzan story.

And getting back to the Weiss Brothers,

they were inspired by the success of the 1918

feature film, "Tarzan of The Apes",

which was the very first Motion Picture based

on one of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan novels.

So in September of 1919,

they negotiated with Burroughs, for the screen rights

to his second Tarzan book, "The Return of Tarzan".

Now, they made a very unusual deal with him,

and really the only one of its kind

to which Burroughs ever agreed.

They paid a licensing fee that gave them the option

of producing two films adapted from the same novel.

And this made sense for the reason

that "The Return of Tarzan" was originally serialized

in Pulp magazines and different installments of the novel

had very distinct subplots.

So it was possible to say,

shoot, two or three subplots and leave another one,

or perhaps two for adaptation

in a subsequent motion picture,

and they would be completely different storylines.

So that's what happened.

Adolph Weiss authorized the creation after he got

the license from Boroughs to introduce

one of those subsidiary companies I was just telling about,

called Numa Pictures Corporation.

Now Numa is the word for lion and the language of Tarzan

and his ape friends.

So they created Numa Pictures Corporation

specifically for their Tarzan venture, okay.

So Numa was headed by Lewis and their attorney,

a guy named Harry Kash was the secretary.

Now they produced a feature film made from

“Return of Tarzan", that starred

a kind of a burly New York based firefighter

named Gene Pollar as Tarzan.

And they made the movie and they were gonna distribute it

as "The Return of Tarzan" the same title as the novel,

but in canvasing the exhibitors about this they said,

well, does this mean, is this a rehash of the earlier film

with Elmo Lincoln “Tarzan Of The Apes"?

No, it's a brand new production,

it's a different Tarzan, et cetera.

Well, finally, they were worried about the confusion

enough that they rechristened the movie

"Revenge of Tarzan" and not "Return of Tarzan”,

although the credits did say that it was adapted

from the "Return of Tarzan" by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

So the scenario for that film

was written by a guy named Robert Saxmar,

and it left the biggest chunk

of the original novel untouched.

So that would be the second film

that the Weiss Brothers would make

from "The Return of Tarzan".

So in preparing this second version,

the contract had not stipulated

that the second film had to be a feature length film.

So they said, you know what,

we can maximize our investment if we make it a serial.

Because if we do like a 15 chapter serials,

we're gonna get 15 weeks of film rentals,

as opposed to the one week that we get,

if it's a feature film.

Now, they would've gotten more money

for the feature film than they would

for an individual serial chapter.

But considering all the revenue they would get

from say 15 episodes, it was a much better policy

to go with a complete serial.

Now this would not make Burroughs happy, obviously,

because he was bound to feel as he did feel

that he was being cheated out of more money

that he could have been making,

but he'd already made the deal.

So he saw all the money he was gonna get

from the Weiss Brothers.

Now it turned out by the way that

"Revenge of Tarzan", the feature film, starring Gene Pollar

as the ape man, that ultimately,

the Weiss Brothers cleaned up,

they sold the worldwide rights to it,

to the Goldwyn distributing corporation

for hundred thousand dollars advance,

and a percentage of the net profits which was not reported,

but that was an extremely good deal for them.

So they had working capital to invest in the second movie

based on the "Return of Tarzan".

So what they did was they decided to call their serial,

"The Adventures Of Tarzan",

and base it on the last segment of the novel

which dealt with the Lost City of Opar and its Queen, La.

Another one of these fabled white Queens

that you only find in African lost cities

don't ask me how that happens.

But that was the biggest chunk of the novel.

And that would be the basis for the Weiss Brothers serial.

Now, obviously they would have to extend the plot

quite a bit because getting 15 chapters

or about four hours of material

out of a hundred pages of a novel was pretty tough to do.

So obviously they had to expand things,

they had to create new subplots and new incidents.

And of course they had to emphasize

the chapter ending perils

that Tarzan and Jane would find themselves in.

So that required it further deviation from the novel.

Nonetheless, they were very secure in their belief

that this would be a big hit.

They did incorporate yet another subsidiary company

called The Adventures of Tarzan Serial Sales Company,

for, "the purposes of exploiting and marketing”

and "the upcoming production”.

So they placed advertisements in the leading

Motion Picture Industry Trade Papers,

proclaiming that "Adventures of Tarzan"

would be available for state rights licensing.

So in other words, rather than sell off distribution rights

to somebody like Goldyn as they had done

with "Revenge of Tarzan",

they intended to make their own territorial sales

and thereby keep all the profits.

So Gene Pollar had not really impressed movie goers

with his portrayal of the ape man in "Revenge of Tarzan".

So the Weiss Brothers said, "We gotta get Elmo Lincoln back.

He's the guy who made the initial impression

as Tarzan, he's the guy we gotta have.”

So the Weiss Brothers said,

we're gonna find this guy and hire him.

Now, they learned that Lincoln was under contract

to a company called The Great Western Production Company,

which was making all kinds of films for Karl Lemily's

Universal Film Manufacturing Company,

which was the early silent era named for what later became

Universal Pictures.

Now, the president of the Great Western Production Company

was Julia Stern and his younger brother

Abe was the vice president.

They had partners named Oscar and Louis Jacobs,

also brothers.

Now, the Sterns were related to Karl Lemily by marriage,

which accounted for their favored nation status

among the various fiefdoms that were sprawled

across Universal City, which at something like 260 acres

was the largest lot than any studio owned.

So Elmo Lincoln had just done the third

of three serials that he made for Universal,

which were produced by Great Western.

First was called "Elmo The Mighty”,

second one was called “Elmo The Fearless",

and the third was called “The Flaming Disc".

Now in two of these, his leading lady was Louise Lorraine,

who you can see here playing Jane in the Tarzan serial.

So Lincoln was temporarily at Liberty.

Universal was still distributing

“The Flaming Disc", and Lincoln had also

made the aforementioned "Under Two Flags”,

which promised to be a big feature film hit.

And so he was a fairly hot property.

So Great Western more specifically Julia Stern

offered the Weiss Brothers to produce

“New Adventures Of Tarzan" for their new

Numa Pictures Corporation.

So the Weiss Brothers wouldn't have to bother

with production at all.

They would naturally approve the script

and arrange for the financing and everything else,

but the actual production of the serial

would go to Great Western.

So naturally the Weiss Brothers agreed to this

because this arrangement guaranteed

that they would get Elmo Lincoln,

who otherwise they would've had to try

and contract separately from Great Western

and if great Western decided to either hold them up

or not to give him Lincoln services at all,

they'd have been screwed.

So they were happy to make this deal,

and it was a deal for Great Western too,

because being related to Lemley gave the Stern brothers

complete access to all of the facilities,

the technicians, and all the sets,

the standing sets that were available at Universal City,

including the street that you're seeing right now,

which had already been used in a number of productions.

So this was a way of getting a lot of good production value

into the serial without spending a lot of new money on sets.

By shooting it at Universal and using standing sets,

Great Western would be able to get

a much more elaborate look to their serial.

So also from Universal, Great Western got the cameramen,

Joe Mayer and Jerry Ash who not only provided

the basic cinematography, but they also did

what limited visual effects were needed

to help maintain some rather elaborate illusions.

They did have to contract separately

for a player named Joe Martin.

Now, Joe Martin was not an actor,

he was Orangutan star of comedy shorts

that were produced by the Sterns

who had a separate label called Century Comedies.

And Century Comedies naturally

also released its product through Universal.

So Joe Martin's trainer insisted on a separate deal

and so they had to cut a separate contract,

but they were happy to do that because Joe Martin

was actually had some box office appeal

because of these two real comedies that he was in.

Now, as it turns out in the final serial,

he did not appear all that often,

but he does appear and you will see him later

in this footage here.

So the final piece was of course,

getting Lillian Lorraine at this time, just 19 years old,

and she was also by the way,

a regular in the century comedies.

So she'd worked plenty for the Sterns,

they were familiar with her.

Production got underway in late January of 1921

and consumed more than seven months,

which is a very long time for serial

would not only including time off for the usual

weather related delays, but they had a lot of trouble

with animals when they were trying to stage

the wild animal scenes.

There was a lot of animal footage in this,

Universal by the way maintained its own zoo.

They kind of took up from where Colonel Williams Selig

left off, Selig had his own zoo

and his own production facilities on the other side of town.

But at Universal, they said,

"We ought really ought to maintain our own zoo."

So they had monkeys, they had gorillas,

they had a couple lions

and all of them were pressed into service

for "Adventures of Tarzan".

So there were other delays related to injuries,

several of the players were injured doing action,

including Elmo Lincoln.

And at a couple times,

production had to be shut down altogether.

The street scenes erected for "Virgin of Stamboul”

you've already seen,

they were among many scenes that were shot

on standing sets at the Universal back lot.

There was limited location shooting.

They were able to do some of it on the Universal back lot,

which like I say, at 260 acres was a big chunk.

There's all kinds of stuff there now,

including by the way, a highway,

which was not there when this film was being made.

But they had scenes that took place in a desert,

they had to get these rolling sand dunes

that most people think of

when they think of the Arabian desert.

So they went to Yuma, Arizona,

and they spent more than a week there,

unfortunately based on the schedule,

they had to spend a week there in the summer.

So the temperatures got up well over a hundred degrees,

there was sunburn, there was sunstroke, people fainting,

problems with the film melting in the cameras,

all kinds of things related to filming

in that kind of a climate.

Now, Lincoln had a reputation for doing all his own stunts

in his other serials, but he had been putting

on a lot of weight over the last couple years

and his prodigious bulk

and his lack of grace kept him from being effective

when it came to a lot of the scenes in the treetops,

which were of course Tarzan's preferred travel lanes.

So in a lot of the scenes that showed,

a lot of the long shots especially

that showed the ape man swinging on vines

and you know, climbing up hand over hand,

Lincoln was doubled by a New Jersey native named Otto Pole.

He was a national gymnastics champion

and a bodybuilder who would later play Tarzan himself,

and under the name Frank Merrill.

While he wasn't doubling Lincoln,

he also played several Arab tribesman.

You've already seen him now and I'll point him out

the next time he turns up.

You can tell, even though Lincoln has a pretty bulky outfit

there as Tarzan, well, not so bulky in that shot.

You can easily see that Merrill is while very well muscled,

he's not quite as large as Lincoln

and especially his legs are kind of on the spindly side.

But, Merrill was very convincing in the vine swinging scenes

and he later made a very good Tarzan himself.

So the principle photography wrapped up in early August,

again, took a lot longer than it should have.

And the national release of chapter one

was scheduled for October 1st.

So that gave the Weiss Brothers roughly six to seven weeks

to edit the serial, to have print struck,

to ship them across the country,

to the various state rights distributors

who then had a needed some time

to get them to the first run theaters

that would play them.

Now it should be noted that serials

at this time in the silent era, they were really-

they had a national release day for the first chapter,

but a lot of times the entire things were not finished.

The entire serials had not been totally edited

or printed up when the first chapter went into release.

So that would happen later on.

And that also led to some very interesting

commercial developments because

when you had more time in production,

while the early chapters were playing in theaters,

and you're still working on the later chapters to edit them,

the early results from the exhibitors might dictate

expanding a serial, they might say,

hey, this thing is going over like gangbusters.

We already wish we had more chapters.

So Frank Merrill's first Tarzan serial,

“Tarzan The Mighty" was originally scheduled for 12 chapters

because it was released in the same way

with the early chapters playing in theaters

before the later chapters had been totally finished,

the exhibitor reaction was so favorable

that Universal said, you know what,

don't put the ending on chapter 12,

let's shoot three more chapters, add this material,

we're gonna get 15 chapters out of it.

Because as I explained

in "New Adventures Of Tarzan" commentary

serials were rented by the chapter.

So if you had a couple thousand theaters

that were playing a serial all at once,

and they all wanted it extended,

that was a lot more revenue at stake

even though the chapters themselves

usually only rented for five bucks a piece,

it was a lot more revenue at stake,

if you could get 3000 theaters to pay that kind of money.

That did not happen with "Adventures of Tarzan",

but the serial was very successful, nonetheless.

Now, originally the Weiss Brothers had planned

to delay marketing it until the shooting was complete.

But Louis Weiss had mounted

a very elaborate and well publicized sales campaign.

And so "Adventures," which was advertised

as the "Tarzan of Tarzans", was very rapidly sold

to territories in the United States and Canada.

As a matter of fact,

state writers in 14 different territories

covering part or all of 26 states in total

bought the serial as soon as it was made available.

And the first run exhibitors in big cities

even supplied what they used to call 24 sheet posters,

very large posters to paste on billboards

and on the sides of large buildings

to help advertise the thing.

And Tarzan being very popular,

the Tarzan books being very popular in Europe,

the Weiss Brothers did well there too.

Europe's Mundus film company paid a record price

for distribution rights in France, Holland, Belgium,

and Switzerland, more than they'd paid for any movie,

feature film, or serial up to that time.

So the Weiss Brothers had a public relations

director named Bert Ennis

and he worked with the domestic sub distributors,

on the creation of very elaborate displays

for theater lobbies and coming up with publicity stunts

that local theaters could engineer

to catch the public's attention.

This kind of thing had, you know,

was very rudimentary in the early days of films

because Nickelodeons usually only played films

for a day or two.

And even as late as 1910,

there were a lot of theaters that were changing

the bill affair every two or three days.

So it really didn't pay to advertise

to come up with elaborate advertising schemes

for these things because in two or three days

they'd be gone and they'd be replaced

by the time the word got out,

by the time a lot of people saw the advertising,

the movies would be gone already.

With a serial it was different

because you'd have the same thing,

you'd have a different chapter every week

in the same theater for 15 weeks in a row.

So it paid to advertise serials with things like billboards

and lobby displays that could stay up for a couple weeks

at a time, it was a very successful strategy.

So as I mentioned before,

the screenwriters expanded quite a bit on the plot,

what was left of the plot of "Return of Tarzan",

but they maintained the same basic story structure.

Tarzan and Jane, her father, professor Porter,

who we've already seen kind of staggering

around the jungle in tattered clothes.

They were all there as were Tarzan's bitter enemy

Nikolas Rokoff played by Frank Woodson

and one of Tarzan's English relatives,

Cecil Clayton.

And then of course there was another heavy,

this guy Gernot who was one of Rokoff's heavys,

and they were the main players.

Later in the serial,

when things moved to the Lost City of Opar,

you had Queen La who was played

by someone named Lillian Worth.

Gernot by the way, there's Frank Whitsun there as Rokoff

Gernot was played by George Monberg

and there's of course,

Charles Insleee playing professor Porter, Jane's father.

(gentle music)

Now, this.

I'm not exactly sure where this area is.

It looks like it could have been shot

in Colonel Selig Zoo, but it also could have been shot

somewhere on the Universal back lot.

What I do know is that they kept these outdoor locations

loaded with wild animals running around,

and whenever the plot slowed up a bit,

director Bob Hill would stage a lion chase

and the lions would run around

and chase everybody up into trees and whatnot.

And that was very effective.

You know, some of the Tarzan's serials had very elaborate

wild animal sequences that were used as stock footage

in movies for 20 and 30 years after they were made.

As a matter of fact,

the first Tarzan movie ever made, "Tarzan of The Apes”

from 1918 was shot in Louisiana.

And there was a shot of a,

kind of a moss covered tree with birds sitting on the limbs

that was being used as a piece of stock footage

well into the 1940s.

So it's pretty amazing stuff.

Now, again, as I say,

they had to stretch the plot quite a bit

before they got to Opar.

And in this particular incarnation of the story

Jane's back or I should say her shoulder

has been kind of tattooed with a map

leading the miscreants to Opar.

Now see this title here is not one of the original titles.

That title was made by the distributor

who releases to the home movie market.

But by and large, this is the same footage that appeared

in the original 1921-1922 version.

It played well, even though it was released nationally

in the fall of 1921, it played well until 1922.

And actually some of the later episodes

were actually copyrighted in 1922

because they weren't yet done at the end of 1921.

That is one big hog.

There's a lot of bacon there, I wanna tell ya.

Actually, that's probably a boar.

Probably a wild boar.

But again, there was a great variety of animals.

And by the way, they weren't all treated very humanely,

as you could see by this.

It was some years before

the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

really started enforcing rules on Hollywood filmmakers.

And that was mostly occasioned as a result of the Westerns,

where there were some rather cruel devices

that would be hooked up to horses

to make them fall at a certain spot

when they were at a full gallop.

So the SPCA was not happy about that, but they extended

their jurisdiction to include all kinds of movies

where animals were concerned,

anything from rabbits to elephants

and everything in between.

So the reviews for "Adventures of Tarzan"

were generally favorable.

And some of them, even more than that,

I mean, some of them were wildly enthusiastic.

Most of the reviews noted to previous Tarzan films

had been so popular that they were still being booked.

And so it was possible in the early 1920s

to see different Tarzan films

playing at different theaters in the same city.

So one of the trade papers called the exhibitors Herald,

said in their review that,

"Elmo Lincoln as Tarzan is too well known to theatergoers

to need further introduction.

His red blooded fights staged in each episode

will evoke applause from the audience.

A menagerie of wild animals has been let loose

to dash through and put thrills into many scenes.”

And it was also possible in those days

to get feedback from the exhibitors,

the theater owners themselves,

because some of the trade papers had columns

where the exhibitor could write in his reaction

to films that he was playing

and this presumably would act as a guide

for exhibitors further down the food chain,

you know, the third, fourth or fifth-run theaters

to get an idea of what they could expect,

whether they would wanna book a film or stay away from it.

And they would rely on the comments

of their fellow exhibitors that were printed

in these trade publications.

So there was one exhibitor named Ed Crew

from the Empress Theaters in Oklahoma.

He slammed “Adventures”.

He said, "This is the poorest serial I ever saw Elmo in,

and the ape man is very poor.

Lay off, it won't get any money.”

But he clearly was an outlier

because the overwhelming percentage of exhibitor reports

were far more favorable.

Now, there was a guy named, AC Bets

who ran the Powers Theater in Red Creek, New York.

Now, if you haven't heard of Red Creek,

it was a very small village.

There were only 500 people in the town

and his theater was at 350 seats,

but people in those locations were generally

very fond of serials.

So AC Bets wrote, "Have shown four episodes of this,

and it is pleasing all.

Holding up fine, have increased my attendance

from 50 people to over 200.

Patrons, fairly eating it up,

making money where I was losing, book it."

So that's pretty impressive in a town of 500 people,

he had 200 in his theater

to watch "The Adventures Of Tarzan".

There was even a more laboratory response

from the manager of the Gaddy theater in Amory, Mississippi.

And he said, "Made money on every episode of this serial.

We are not strong for serials,

but advise exhibitors to work this up for the kids

and play it and follow it with "Son Of Tarzan".

Price is right"

that means the rental price he was being charged,

"and they are money makers."

So "Son of Tarzan" was the previous serial

involving the ape man that had been made

and released in 1920.

But because of the nature of these serials,

you know, when you've got something that takes 15 weeks

to play off, and you've got six or seven runs of theaters

and various sizes and various sized towns,

it takes over a year to fully extract all the revenue

that you're gonna get from these smaller theaters.

So it was still possible to play "Adventures of Tarzan"

in late '21 and early '22,

while "Son of Tarzan" from 1920 was still playing

in subsequent run theaters.

Now it's a shame that the original 15 episode version

that was released in 1921 does not survive intact.

These reels that you're seeing here

were found in exceptionally nice shape,

and there have been others that have turned up.

And in the early 80's an enterprising,

a distributor of VHS videotapes managed to get

a bunch of the 1921 chapters and the 1928 reissue chapters,

that the Weiss Brothers released,

and he edited them together and tried to make something

coherent out of this whole mess, which wasn't easy

because as I said before, the 1928 reissue was edited,

a third of the footage was missing

because you originally had 15 chapters

and the reissue version was 10.

So trying to get something that would be coherent

was not easy, especially because with all the material

this guy had, this video distributor,

he still missed chapter one.

So we still didn't get to see the beginning of the story.

But that version was around-

it was kind of bootleg,

it was not an official commercial release.

But it was around for many years

and a lot of us who saw it had got a much better idea

of what was in "Adventures of Tarzan".

You know, there's fair amount of thrills in this version

that we're watching here, but it's really only a fraction

of what was previously available.

Now, I mentioned earlier that there was a guy

who began working for the Weiss Brothers

with their first big feature film success

named George W Merrick

who became kind of a jack-of-all-trades.

He was the one who supervised the reediting

of this 15 chapter version into the 10 chapter version.

And I suspect he was the one who rewrote

the titles that they used.

So now we're seeing Queen La for the first time.

This is an actress named Lillian Worth,

who was not a big star.

I'm not aware off the top of my head really,

of any leading roles that she had.

I think she usually played society matrons

and things like that.

But she makes an appropriately queenly La of Opar

and her name has been banded about also by Tarzan fans

and so-called Tarzan film historians.

For many years she was mistakenly identified

as playing Queen La in the 1929 Tarzan serial,

"Tarzan The Tiger”,

which is a very faithful adaptation

of the fifth Tarzan novel, "Tarzan And The Jewels of Opar".

Well, I don't know who came up with that,

who got the idea,

I mean, I've seen it in print as far back as 1966,

there was a book called “Tarzan of The Movies"

written by a guy named Gabe Esso.

Who's a very knowledgeable fan and a real Tarzan enthusiast.

He listed Lillian Worth as playing Queen La

in that 1929 serial.

As it happens, he was wrong,

the part of La in that later film was played

by a actress of middle Eastern descent,

whose name, well, her name in film,

she build herself as Madam Maisel Kisnu,

and she does have another name,

but I don't remember it offhand.

Anyway, Kisnu was I thought a very sensual, very sexy La,

much more effective, I think, than Lilian Worth

here in this film.

But the only reason that we found out about the mistake

is that after many years of being lost

a print of "Tarzan The Tiger” surfaced

in the mid 1980s,

and a very enterprising, but rather unscrupulous bootlegger

had the print transferred, digitally transferred,

and he released it first on VHS tape

to a very select group of serial aficionados.

And then later people copied it onto DVD

and it's now commercially available from companies

like Alpha Video and one or two others

that specialize in that kind of product.

"Tarzan The Tiger", I think is a very good serial.

Doesn't have as many wild animals as this serial does,

but Frank Merrill is very effective.

The actress who plays Jane,

Natalie Kingston is very effective.

And as I mentioned, Madam Maisel Kisnu

as La of Oparis also quite good.

So I would recommend to you "Tarzan The Tiger".

Again, that's a ridiculous title for a character

who was raised by apes.

I don't know why they ever came up with that.

I frankly don't know why they didn't just use

the title of the novel

because they had legitimately licensed the novel

from Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Why not just call it "Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar,"

but I digress.

(upbeat music)

Based on the footage that I've seen,

which includes this milange of odd reels

and the earlier version I talked

about that was kind of patched together from footage,

from both the 1921 and 28 versions.

It's pretty interesting serial.

I mean, it's nothing if not frantically paced

with captures and escapes taking place

in, you know, lightning fast succession.

And like I said before, whenever things slowed down

the director, Robert F Hill would say,

send in the lions and (chuckling)

you know, all of a sudden there'd be lions

chasing everybody around the forest.

But now we're getting to the part of the story

that's set in Lopa.

This is where we've had the desert scenes.

I don't know exactly where this particular spot takes place.

It may be near, Yuma, Arizona.

I suspect it's actually on the Universal back lot.

For those of you who don't know,

or have only visited Universal in recent years

because they do tours there all the time,

a lot of the back lot, which was, you know, wild terrain,

they shot a lot of Westerns there,

a lot of, you know, horses chasing each other.

A lot of it was very hilly

and there were a fair amount of rocks,

and there was a little bit of forest,

although nothing as dense as the jungle

that we see here, at least not that I know of,

but, you know, that was likely

that spot right there was likely on the back lot.

And it was pretty easy to find

some kind of topographical elements as needed,

you know, whether you were shooting in valleys

or ravines or, you know, a top rolling hills,

or it was an area that was quite adaptable for filmmaking.

And this could very well be in the hills

and back of Universal.

I mean, now it's hard to picture

because these days you've got

what's known as highway 101 in Southern California,

it runs right through this property

on the, what would it be on the,

Southern side of the lot.

There are also other housing developments

and various things taking up space there.

But it was pretty darn handy to have access

to all the Universal standing sets

and to the lot, because without that access,

the Great Western Production Company,

would've spent a whole lot more

on "Adventures of Tarzan" then they actually did.

And quite frankly there's a possibility

of film never would've been made at all

because had it been a really expensive production,

the Weiss Brothers in all probability

would not have been able to raise the amount of capital

that they needed.

So you're probably wondering

whatever happened to Joe Martin.

We talked about Joe Martin before that Orangutan

with the human intelligence

that was so highly built up in the publicity

for this serial.

He's really not in it that much.

I mean, he must have been quite popular

with theater goers to justify his prominence

in the advertising, but you'll see him a little later,

but he really doesn't have much to do in the serial proper,

at least not enough to justify his prominence.

Well speak of the devil, I think that's him now.

And now they're gonna cut away from ‘em, so.

And that of course, would've been one of the

indoor stages at Universal.

When Universal City first opened up for business in 1915,

they didn't have indoor stages,

they had a very long outdoor stage

that was sectioned off for multiple companies.

So there could be six movies shooting in one day

at the same time simultaneously on this long stage.

I believe it was 200 feet long or 300 feet long.

So we're rapidly approaching the climax.

We're now into what would've been

the final chapter of the original serial.

So after 14 episodes,

Rokoff and Gernot have finally penetrated

the Lost City of Opar and they're determined to loot it,

get the treasure that's there for the taking.

Now you can see some of these natives look pretty shaggy

that's because Edgar Rice Burroughs in the novels

described the Queen La's subjects

as beastly or only half human,

or, you know, descended from the missing link

or something like that.

The women aren't quite as unattractive,

but these guys are supposed to be real savages.

Now, again, the enduring mystery of jungle movies

and jungle stories like the Tarzan novels

is where are all these white Queens popping up?

Where are they from?

They all pop up in these African law cities.

How did they get there?

That's a question that nobody seems to want to answer.

This clearly is an artificial set.

You can see by the rocks there,

it looks like they've painted some shadows on the rocks.

That's the kind of stagecraft that was used

in the early silent era that they never would've gotten

away with later on when talking pictures came in.

And they would make these caves,

they'd be made out of either plaster of paris,

or they might even be paper mache.

That's kind of plastered over plywood

and chicken wire structures.

Again, typically serials were produced inexpensively,

especially relative to feature length films at this time.

So they would try to achieve the best possible effects

on as little money possible.

So elaborate things like glass shots

and match shots and double exposures, things like that.

Well, double exposures weren't very expensive to do,

but a lot of the things were.

So the serials tried to downplay them,

and that's also why the writers,

when they were concocting the stories,

even if they were adapting them from other sources,

they would constantly have to keep in mind

what kind of sets were available on the lot,

because if they could utilize a big set

that was built for an expensive picture,

especially an expensive feature film

that made serial look a whole lot better

without having to incur the additional expense.

And now here's for the umpteenth time,

Jane is being chased by a lion.

(gentle music)

Lorraine is, to use a word that's

kind of out of favor today, she's a very plucky heroine.

She has a lot of courage,

in real life she faced a lot of danger,

in these serials, she was injured a number of times,

she made quite a few serials and I don't think she emerged

from one of them completely unscathed.

Although I don't believe

she suffered any really serious injuries.

Now, there is a story that might be apocryphal

that takes place during the making of this serial,

in which supposedly Elmo Lincoln

was very upset about being asked to do something.

And for some reason, he got on the bad side of director,

Robert F Hill.

And according to a story,

that's in a book on serials called "Bound and Gagged"

by an author who purported to talk to Hill

personally about this.

At some point during the "Adventures of Tarzan" filming

while Lincoln and Hill were squabbling,

it was some kind of thing where Lincoln's costume there

came apart and they held it together with safety pins,

and at some point he pricked his finger on a safety pin

and he let out a yelp and the crew laughed at him

and they stopped filming

and Lincoln stormed off the set with his feelings hurt

and told somebody he wasn't gonna come back.

So Hill, according to this account in this book,

decided to talk loudly enough

so that Lincoln's double, one of his doubles,

a guy named Monte Montague,

who I think frankly, he's referred to as a double.

I think he was probably a stand-in

because Frank Merrill did a lot of the doubling

that Lincoln needed.

I think Hill said something within earshot of Monte Montague

to the effect that they were gonna change the story.

If Lincoln was gonna be a problem,

they were gonna change the story.

So the Tarzan would walk into a magic river of some kind,

and they would have Monte Montague as the stand-in

shot from behind walking into this water,

and then they would have a double exposure

and Tarzan would emerge from the other side as a small boy.

And that somehow the properties of the water

had turned him into a small boy,

which sounds like an absolutely ridiculous idea.

And again, I'm skeptical if this ever happened,

but according to the story is printed in this book,

Monte Montague then went back to Elmo Lincoln

and said, listen, you better get your ass back on the set

because Hill is gonna change the story in midstream

and he's gonna write you out of the plot.

So supposedly at that point, Lincoln came back and they kind

of ironed out their differences.

Again, it's a very colorful, but a very unlikely yarn.

I'm not sure that I believe it, but it is part of the lore

surrounding this particular serial.

So now Rokoff, Gernot, and their Arab henchman

are all choking on this poison gas.

Good enough for 'em I say.

(gentle music)

Now after "Adventures of Tarzan"

Edgar Rice Burroughs took a break from Hollywood.

He did not grant any further licenses

at this particular time.

Now you have to remember by 1922,

when this serial finished its playoff,

in a period of four years, beginning in 1918,

there had been three feature films, "Tarzan of The Apes”,

"The Romance of Tarzan", both of which starred Elmo Lincoln,

the aforementioned "Revenge of Tarzan",

which starred the fireman Gene Pollar,

and then two serials, "The Son of Tarzan",

which starred P Dempsey Tabler as Tarzan.

And this film,

"The Adventures Of Tarzan" returning Lincoln to the role

that made him a star.

That was a lot of Tarzan in a four year period.

Burroughs himself was trying to get away

from the character, even though the Tarzan novels

were the most popular stories that he wrote,

he was tired of them and he felt his own personal view

was that the character was kind of written out

that he'd really done everything he could do

with the character in the first five novels or so.

And that everything after that,

he was just gonna find himself repeating

the kinds of situations

and using the similar types of characters

that he'd already gone through

in the first four or five novels.

So he was looking to get away from Tarzan.

So it was not until 1927

that the ape man would return to the screen.

And we discussed this some in the commentary

for "New Adventures at Tarzan".

He was played by a guy named Jim Pierce,

who was a football star

and a football coach who did occasional work in movies

and somehow met up with Edgar Rice Burroughs

who reportedly said, that's him, that's my Tarzan.

And he appeared in a feature film called

“Tarzan and the Golden Lion",

which was based on the ninth Tarzan novel of the same name.

After that of course, in 1928,

you had "Tarzan The Mighty",

followed by "Tarzan The Tiger” the next year.

They both start Frank Merrill, who as Otto pole was,

formerly a Newark police officer, who was a bodybuilder

and a competitive athlete, national champion

in certain gymnastic contests.

He was the final silent movie Tarzan, and after that,

you had of course, Johnny Weissmuller

in "Tarzan The Apeman”, 1932.

And that began that whole string of Tarzan movies.

So for a guy who really was sick of the ape man by 1922,

Burrows actually did pretty well with him.

He saw new Tarzans and new Tarzan movies being made

throughout his entire life.

He passed away in the years after World War Il.

He'd been a war correspondent during World War Il.

And he continued to license the ape man to Hollywood,

even though he was never really happy

or he claimed, it's been claimed,

he was never really happy with the way

Tarzan was treated on film.

He found, fought with all of the films,

even the ones that he liked from a production standpoint.

You know, for example,

he thought that the first two Weissmuller films

were fantastic as movies in terms of the thrills

and the atmosphere and, you know,

the general overall production value that they had.

And yet it bothered him that they didn't

stick even remotely close to the character

that he had written, the boy who was raised in the jungle,

but who eventually returned civilization

and became this cultured English Lord.

So Shic Ben Ali,

is going to die as he lived, violently,

according to this newly made title

was made for this version.

Again, take it big as the expression

that old time actors used to describe overacting.

Once again, Lilian Lorraine and her father

are cowering from lions.

So they're stretching this out a little more

than it needs to be.

This is basically the last sequence of the film.

But you know, the other thing with doing a serial was

you had to have chapters that were roughly the same length.

And if you know, were five minutes short of that

20 minute length, you had to have for a chapter,

then you had to vamp until it was done.

Here's another ape suit scene.

I think we're gonna see Joe Martin one more time,

if I'm not mistaken.

I don't know where this footage is shot,

that scene there on that beach or whatever it is.

Now Rokoff is apprehended in "Return of Tarzan",

but he escapes and he menaces Tarzan

again in both the third novel,

"The Beast of Tarzan" and the fourth novel

"Son of Tarzan", which finally kills him off.

And of course, "Son of Tarzan"

deals with Lord Greystoke's son,

who even though he's been raised

on the luxurious estates of his father of his parents,

longs, he has the jungle in his blood.

He doesn't really know why cause he's never been there,

but he's got the jungle in his blood

and he winds up in Africa

and he becomes kind of a Tarzan light

who is known among the animals as Corak the Killer,

another great white ape, like his father Tarzan.

Well Rokoff after so many years

has hoped to get the ultimate revenge on Tarzan

by killing his son.

And he's responsible for Corak being shanghai'd

and taken to Africa.

So even though this looks like he's been apprehended

and is gonna spend the rest of his days behind bars,

I don't think,

that's certainly not what Burroughs had in mind.

This stuff doesn't seem all that thrilling,

but audiences in the silent era

were absolutely mesmerized by all this wild animal stuff.

And I guess that in the days before television,

if you didn't have a zoo in a large city or near you

had no way of ever seeing lions or tigers or elephants.

But there was no way of seeing creatures like this,

unless you saw them in the movies.

And so audiences really ate up all this footage

and they were not yet jaded, you know, in 1921 and "22,

when they were seeing this movie,

they were not yet jaded by guys in ape suits

or stuffed animals being tossed around or whatever.

This is a Tarzan giving some really protracted goodbyes

here to his jungle friends.

Elmo Lincoln and Louise Lorraine made a good team.

I really wish that I could see the other two serials

they did together.

“Elmo the Fearless" and the "Flaming Disc".

But sadly, those are lost films.

Like 90% of all the silent films ever made

deteriorated over the years

because the nitrate film they were printed on

was unstable or their negatives,

which were very flammable, have gone up in fires.

We have to be really grateful that any of it survives.

And even though I'm the first to admit

that this particular incarnation of "Adventures of Tarzan"

is not the most coherent,

the fact that we have any of it at all

is a reason for celebration.

And I wanna thank The Film Detective

for reviving this film,

for making it look as good as it can,

and for getting me to do the commentary.