Tarzana - The Wild Girl (1969)

Some films require no further explanation beyond their trailers. Tarzana is one such movie. The title alone gives you a pretty good idea of what you'll be getting: a female Tarzan, orphaned in the jungle as a toddler after a plane crash which kills her parents. The amount of female flesh on display in the trailer gives you an even better idea of what is about. What better excuse for gratuitous displays of female nudity could there be than a jungle adventure about a wild woman? Wouldn't it be natural that, growing up with no human contact, she'd have no inhibitions or knowledge of civilised mores like clothes? Well, maybe. But the fact is that the film is simply about titillation - even the supposedly 'civilised' woman who is part of the group searching for Tarzana bares her breasts at regular intervals, (most hilariously at the climax when she does it to reassure Tarzana that she and the hero are the wild girl's friends and can be trusted), on the flimsiest of pretexts.

But back in 1969 it wasn't always easy to get naked breasts past the censors if you didn't want your movie labelled as pornography. UK producers tended to go for those naturist 'documentaries' (which were purely educational, obviously). Carry on Camping got away with it via the device of Sid James and co watching one of said documentaries in a cinema. Italian producers, by contrast used the device of presenting it as an adventure picture, with the nudity being integral to the storyline. Hence Tarzana. In truth, the trailer contains all of the film's 'highlights', particularly in terms of nudity. That said, I have watched an incredibly scratchy UK language version and can tell you that it is an almost entirely studio bound and very tatty looking affair that takes forever getting anywhere. Padded out with lots of stock footage of lions, elephants and other wild life, it includes the usual (for the period) patronising portrayals of African natives. Tarzana herself, played by the very lovely Femi Banussi, has surprisingly little to do (except wander around near naked, of course) - until the final twenty minutes or so, she doesn't even have any interaction with the rest of the cast. Most of her scenes prior to this are shared with a chimp and concern her following and spying on the expedition sent by her millionaire Grandfather to find her. Some rare location shots show her (or, more likely, her stunt double) swinging through the tress, Tarzan-style. However, rather than a jungle, the location looks remarkably like some Autumnal woods outside Rome.

I wouldn't say that Tarzana is complete waste of time - if you like beautiful ladies wandering around the jungle in a thong, dancing wildly or just gratuitously taking their clothes off, it's undoubtedly well worth ninety minutes of your time - but it has little to offer in terms of narrative, character, direction or production values. That said, despite being wholly unoriginal, Tarzana does exercise a certain fascination while it is on, with its typically ropy dubbing, in the English language version, adding to the amusement already inherent in the poverty row production values. It's certainly entertaining, but probably not quite in the way the makers intended. If you aren't into rickety old exploitation movies like this (and the pleasures they hold) then just stick to the trailer.