New Movies: The Death of Tarzan

This latest arrival from the Czech cinematic surge is both sad and slapstick in an old-fashioned way. It is a Chaplinesque morality play about simple innocence in the rapacious world, aptly matched with direction and photography that point up the pastiche without collapsing into camp.

The Tarzan of the title is Baron Wolfgang von Hoppe (Rudolf Hruŝínsky), whose parents take him to the African jungle around the turn of the century to escape the sinks of civilization. Vati and Mutti promptly perish, of course, and little Wolfgang grows up among the apes. Captured by hunters some time in the '30s, he returns to the family Schloss, where the estate is being run by his rascally cousin Heinrich (Martin Ružek). Heinrich hires an English governess called Regina (Jana Štěpaňková) to give the ape-baron enough training to convince a commission that he is competent to take over his rightful inheritance. On the sly, he offers her a handsome reward to fail; Regina, though, does her perfidious best to get Wolfgang's money while she gets him.

In the process, she imbues him with the ideals of human brotherhood, and the result is a new version of the Noble Savage showing up the hypocrisy of Civilized Man (as in Voltaire's L'Ingénu). The disillusioned baron ends up in a circus, where he is displayed as Tarzan the ape man.

The essence of the film, though, is not in the comic-strip chiaroscuro of its plot but in the fun Director Jaroslav Balík and his cast have with their caricatures. Rudolf Hruŝínsky turns in a burly, brachycephalic performance as the ape man, first delighted by the apparent selflessness of humans—who do not fight for food at a reception and talk constantly of altruism—then horrified at the superjungle that gives the lie to their platitudes. "People, what are you doing?" he cries as the assorted forces of evil tangle in, around, up, down and through his baroque baronial halls. And in a delicious caricature of a caricature, Balík decks out his English and German villains in those capitalist top hats that Communist cartoonists place on all Western heads.