Cinema: Wild Child Noble Savage

GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES Directed by Hugh Hudson Screenplay by P.H. Vazak and Michael Austin

Grab a vine, give a yell and prepare to take a leap of faith: they have gone and made an utterly serious Tarzan movie and, believe it or not, it is rather good. Indeed, much of Greystoke is very good, a tender, thoughtful and pictorially beautiful working out of the themes that were implicit in Edgar Rice Burroughs' original conception, but which over 70 years of life in the Hollywood jungle have been choked off by the riotous, unchecked growth of weedy invention and seedy, B-picture convention.

In fact, the first thing a viewer of the new film has to do is take a machete to his comfortable expectations about the Ape Man. Banish beefy Johnny Weissmuller, his predecessors and his heirs from your mind; rethink Jane; forget Boy; above all, abandon hope that Cheeta the chimp will skitter on to provide not only the movie's best acting but its only conscious comic relief as well. All of that was admittedly fun, as if the cast of a suburban sitcom had been dropped down in the African hinterlands, told to undress and act natural. But Burroughs, that dauntlessly prolific pop fictioneer, had something more important on his mind when he dreamed up Tarzan: nothing less than the creation of a mythic figure who would encapsulate the Edwardian age's anguish over the way the virtues of the primitive life were being trampled by the irresistible march of industrialism and imperialism. It is this figure that Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, has sought to restore, on a near tragic scale.

As a symbol, Tarzan (played lithely but never blithely by Christopher Lambert) requires little decoding. Born the seventh Earl of Greystoke to parents shipwrecked on the African coast, orphaned in infancy and raised by an extended family of apes, he is rescued and restored to his patrimony by a passing explorer (Ian Holm, who symbolizes humanity at its best). Unfortunately, he fits as uneasily into English society as he did into simian society, despite the loving fuss made over him by his grandfather (the late Ralph Richardson in all his glorious eccentricity). The old man's death, when he attempts to break free of lordly constraint to celebrate his grandson's return, and the death of Tarzan's ape "father," at the hands of a panicky civilization, turn the noble savage into a premature existentialist permanent outsider, last seen heading back to the bush, where he will have to invent a life in the borderlands between two communities he can never fully join. Jane (Andie MacDowell) watches him go, awaiting reunion in a sequel one suspects will never be.

There is an inescapable poignancy in this tale, and a relevance for contempo rary romantics that perhaps Hudson and his writers are a little too impressed with.