Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950) – Review

Tarzan and the Slave Girl is the second outing with Lex Barker as the Ape Man and though the series still relies much on studio backlots it actually has more fantastical elements than what was seen in any of the Weissmuller movies. In Tarzan’s Magic Fountain our heroes had encountered a hidden valley, one that contained an elixir giving fountain of youth, and in this installment, Tarzan must do battle with a lost outpost of ancient Egypt, two things not at all that uncommon in the Burroughs books.  In fact, if you were to chart out all the “lost cities” and “lost outposts” found in Burroughs’ books, there’d be more of them than actual jungle.

This movie begins with Tarzan (Lex Barker) and Jane (Vanessa Brown) hearing a scream while wandering through the jungle via elephant. When they stop to investigate they discover that a local tribeswoman has been abducted and that her superstitious people have put her disappearance down to “dark spirits” but it only takes Tarzan a couple of minutes of jungle lore deduction to figure out she has been kidnapped. Along with a couple of tribesmen, Tarzan tracks down the kidnappers, but after a brief altercation, the abductors escape with the girl.  Though it wasn’t a clean getaway, as Tarzan managed to cut up the face of one of the villains and capture another.

Today’s villains borrowed wardrobe from a Flash Gordon serial.

Before Tarzan and the angry villagers can interrogate their prisoner, Jane discovers that the man is deathly ill with a very contagious disease, and she quickly sends Tarzan to fetch Dr. Campbell (Arthur Shields) who, with the help of his voluptuous nurse Lola (Denise Darcel), and drunken big game hunter Neil (Robert Alda), put together a rescue party. Because hunting down kidnappers is man’s work Tarzan tells Jane to take Lola to their treehouse for safekeeping, but unfortunately, it turns out that Lola has got the hots for Tarzan, and Jane has to put her in her place.

Jungle Catfight.

After losing her fight with Jane, Lola runs off into the jungle, only to be immediately captured. When Jane swings to her rescue she is promptly captured as well. This is not Jane’s finest hour, and she is basically a damsel in distress throughout.  It seems that a lost civilization of people, called Lionians, who, surprise surprise, worship lions, and are currently on a slave run to replenish their population due to this deadly disease plaguing their people. The leader of the slavers, Sengo (Anthony Caruso), targeted Jane because of Tarzan carving up his face.  It’s sad that some people take facial maiming so personally.

That all the captured native girls are white also seems a bit odd.

This may not be the best Tarzan movie, but it is chock full of a lot of fun stuff; Tarzan and the safari must fight off blow-dart wielding camouflaged native, who are allies of the Lionians, and Jane and Lola are entombed alive, and we meet a sad Prince who has a dying son, then we get Tarzan single-handedly taking on the Lionians warriors. So people will be sacrificed to a group of man-eating lions, elephants will come to the rescue, and Tarzan will, of course, give Sengo his comeuppance, overall making a movie that has everything that one would expect to find in a Tarzan jungle adventure.

Luckily there are no giant apes to give them a hard time here.

This was Vanessa Brown’s only outing as Jane, she only took the part because she needed rent money, “My intellectual friends said, ‘My God, what you won’t do for money.‘” Lex Baxter gets to a lot more to do this time out, and he seems to have settled nicely into the role and is given some really nice action moments.  The comedy bits with Cheeta are limited to only one drunken ape scene, and him bashing Lionians on the head with a club during the big finale is quite fun. This film does contain two of the big standards found in the early Tarzan films, and that would be elephants coming to the rescue, and native bearers in a safari dropping like flies. Though to be fair, if you’re not Tarzan or Jane there is a good chance you are going to buy it when visiting the Africa of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Happily Ever After.

You can find all my Tarzan movie reviews here: Tarzan at the Movies