Tarzan of the Apes
(1918)

Country: USA

Genre: Action, Adventure

Synopsis

After John and Alice Clayton - Lord and Lady Greystoke - are marooned by mutineers on their way to Africa, they die, leaving their newborn boy to be raised by a great Ape, Kala. Later the boy (Gordon Griffith) finds his father's knife and uses it to become King of the Apes. Binns, the sailor who saved the Claytons during the earlier mutiny, and who has been held by Arab slavers for ten years, finds the young Tarzan and heads for England to notify his kin. A scientist is sent to corroborate Binns' story. The scientist's daughter Jane is carried off by a native, rescued by the now-adult Tarzan (Elmo Lincoln), and the two fall in love.

Notes

• The first Tarzan movie ever made, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, this movie is considered to be a very faithful adaptation of the novel.
• The movie adapts only the first part of the novel, the remainder becoming the basis for the sequel, "The Romance of Tarzan" (1918).
• Gordon Griffith appears on screen as the boy Tarzan before Elmo Lincoln, both in the main body of the narrative and in the brief sequence showing the two actors in silhouette near the beginning of the film. He is, therefore, indisputably, the first ever onscreen Tarzan.

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