Cinema: Bongo Bongo Boffo

Last week, 40 years after his first swing on a back-lot liana, Tarzan of the Apes ooo-eee-ooed the famed yodel, dropped from the treetops into his 32nd movie. Since the other 31 were all financial successes—a combined total gross of more than $500 million and a total audience of 2 billion people—the new Tarzan's Fight for Life showed the sort of promise most appreciated by Cinemogul Sy Weintraub, new head of Sol Lesser Productions, owner of the ape man.

The film also shows a Tarzan who has evolved in a wide arc from the original character of Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, first played on the screen by the late Elmo Lincoln in 1918. Compared to Elmo, who was built like a water tower and once —on the set—killed a lion that tried to rough him up, the Tarzans of mid-century are sissies. Tarzan's dialogue, over the years, has improved from a simple grunt to almost literate palaver.

The first Tarzan who actually spoke whole sentences was Lex Barker, of the New York Social Register, who in 1948 replaced Johnny Weissmuller, the mobil-est Tarzan of them all. An Olympic champion and once the fastest swimmer in the world, Weissmuller also holds the record for longevity as the jungle hero: twelve versions over 16 years. Today's Tarzan is Gordon Scott, 30, with a 50-in. chest. A onetime lifeguard at a Las Vegas hotel, Scott is the first Tarzan in color and CinemaScope.

In Tarzan's Fight for Life, Scott carries on with Jane No. 19 (Eve Brent), demonstrates what has become of Novelist Burroughs' inarticulate hero, the offspring of titled British parents whose deaths left him as a child to the motherhood of the jungle. The pristine Tarzan of the screen who hated all white men—although his name, in Burroughswahili, meant white (tar) man (zan)—is now the champion of modern medical science. Tarzan 1958 knows a simple defense against the slings and arrows of mumbo jumbo. His prescription: "Take pill quick."