TARZAN AND THE GREEN GODDESS (1938)

Deep in the jungles of Guatemala, the residents of a "lost city" worship an ancient Mayan statue of the Green Goddess, unaware that inside it is a formula for a super-explosive that any number of governments might want to get their hands on. The idol has been stolen but recovered by the British archeologist Martling, working with his buddy Tarzan, but it gets stolen again by the nefarious Raglan whose boss wants to offer it to the highest bidding government. Unfortunately, the Goddess cannot be safely opened without a code—otherwise, it will explode—so Raglan has to try and steal the code book from Martling even as Martling's group is trying to take the Goddess back from Raglan. Because this is a feature film version of a serial, we get a series of short scenes in which our good guys (Martling, Tarzan, an exotic woman named Ula Vale and a comic-relief doofus named George) tangle with the bad guys, getting into and out of some tight scrapes involving a lion, a tiger, a crocodile, a raging waterfall, and a small boat in the middle of a typhoon. The most impressive escape involves a bound Tarzan bursting out of rope by the power of his chest muscles alone (pictured). Of course, the idol is rescued and the explosive formula kept out of the hands of evildoers.

This movie has a complicated history. In 1935, a 12-chapter serial called THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, co-produced by Tarzan's author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was released to compete with the MGM Tarzan series. Most serial chapters run about 20 minutes, but this one had a first chapter that ran an hour, which contained most of the backstory about the idol and the lost city. A version of the first couple of chapters was made available as its own movie, but three years later, this film, an edited version of chapters 4-12 of the serial, was released. Nothing from the first chapter is included—what we need to know is given as exposition—and what is kept is mostly the beginnings and ends of the chapters, in order to keep as many cliffhanger situations as possible. Cutting out the less exciting scenes certainly moves the action along, though I was surprised to hear no background music, which usually heightens our experience of the fisticuffs. Herman Brix (later known as Bruce Bennett) is good as Tarzan; he’s not as muscly as most Tarzans, more slim and lithe like TV’s Ron Ely, and he also speaks perfect English and occasionally wears clothes. 

Because of the slam-bang pace, most of the other actors don’t get to make an impression except for Lew Sargent as the comic relief. You can sense him wanting to be funny, but his material falls flat except for an amusing bit where he chases a monkey that has stolen his yo-yo. Don Castello, who plays Raglan, is actually Ashton Dearholt who co-produced the movie with Burroughs. Ula Holt (playing Ula Vale) was Dearholt's wife. Some location shooting in Guatemala helps dispel the somewhat claustrophobic feel of most jungle melodramas that shoot on sets, though there are plenty of studio sets here. It is claimed that this version of the film has some added footage not in the original serial, but no one seems to know which scenes those might be. Favorite line: Raglan yelling, "Get your hands off that goddess!"  [TCM]