Tarzan's Desert Mystery (1943)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

In this first Tarzan film made at RKO, Johnny Weissmuller gets an assignment from Jane to get some plant vines whereby medicine can be extracted. It's for her nursing work in London with the troops. The only place to get it is across a desert near a city called Bin Harreri. So Weissmuller, Johnny Sheffield as Boy and the ever present,annoying, but resourceful Cheetah set out on Tarzan's Desert Mystery.The film should have been called Tarzan's Desert Intrigue because while there's no mystery involved there's a lot of intrigue. Along the way Tarzan and his gang pick up stranded vaudeville entertainer Nancy Kelly who's got a mission of her own from a sheik, a secret message to deliver to the sheik in Bin Harreri, Lloyd Corrigan. Pretty soon everybody's involved in the Bin Harreri political situation.Which includes a couple of white outsiders played by Otto Kruger and Joe Sawyer. They're agents for the Nazis and plan to stir up trouble that the Reich can take advantage of. When Kelly is framed for the murder of Robert Lowery, Corrigan's son, everybody flees with the sheik and the Nazis after them.Of course both missions are accomplished. The change from the Tiffany Studio MGM to RKO which was the lowest rank of the A studios is quite apparent in production values. Also I'm not quite sure why all those prehistoric monster footage from One Million BC was included except that it did provide a dandy end for one of the villains.Tarzan's Desert Mystery is nice entertainment for the Saturday afternoon crowd back in the day. It's kind of dated for today's taste though.

When Johnny Weissmuller made the Tarzan films for MGM, they were amazingly good for what they were. They had decent stories and production values and were quite enjoyable. However, in the 1940s the series moved to RKO--a much lower-budget and lower-status studio. Weissmuller made this move, but poor old Maureen O'Sullivan was still under contract with MGM and was forced to remain behind and make GOOD movies (poor Maureen!). To explain her absence, the films made lots of lame excuses until several films later when they re-cast the Jane role--in the meantime, she was said to either be visiting family or helping out in the war effort! To put it quite bluntly, when "Tarzan Triumphs" (the previous film for RKO) debuted, it was obvious the series had peaked and was in a fast decline. After all, this previous film had the man of the jungle fighting Nazis!!! Here in "Tarzan's Desert Mystery", Tarzan helps a condemned lady prove her innocence and prevent the usurpation of the throne in a desert nation. I think the "Desert Mystery" from the title was actually referring to why Tarzan was in the desert in the first place AND why the film switched abruptly from jungle to desert scenes again and again (like an Ed Wood production). Overall, the film makes no sense and truly looks like a bad B-movie where, at the last minute, they just inserted Tarzan as a supporting character! And, they didn't really bother re-writing the film to explain any of this! Too bad, as the film did have Otto Kruger--a decent actor who should have been above making this sort of mess. Truly an awful Tarzan film--mostly because it never makes any sense.

Tarzan this time has to deal with scheming foreign nazis who are plotting against a local Sheik to takeover his land. They manage to have Tarzan put in jail and try to get his lady friend (as in only a friend) hanged. Finally Tarzan ends up in a mysterious jungle with some rather familiar slurpasaurs as well as giant venus flytraps and a giant spider. This Tarzan mixes in lost world elements which really don't work as well as the earlier Tarzan adventure. Also one really misses the lack of Jane's presence on screen. Sometimes enjoyable, sometimes not so much so.

When I was growing up and Tarzan pictures were shown regularly on a local television station every saturday morning, this is the one I and my friends would wait for: the one with the giant spider. It's not the best of the series otherwise, but has an interesting locale (North rather than sub-Saharan Africa), and a non-Jane leading lady for the big guy (Nancy Kelly). I can't recall whether Tarzan and Miss Kelly get together romantically, but she was a most attractive woman and a nice change of pace for the series, which was beginning to run out of gimmicks. Otto Kruger makes a pretty good, refined villain; his small, slight stature contrasts interestingly with Weisssmuller's. But it's the spider most people remember best from this film, and it's big, furry one with a sticky web and eight disturbingly agile legs. I've never cared much for arachnids, and don't know anyone who does, and so just watching the movie was both a trial and a thrill, as I could only hope I would behave with such bravery and resourcefulness as the swinging hero of the film were I caught up in a similar circumstance.