Over a hundred years old now, the silent Tarzan of the Apes (1918) is entrancing. It opens as it should: with frightening shots of such African creatures as lions, snakes and crocodiles. Tarzan is not intimidated, which is good. Enemies keep popping up, and this includes Arab slave traders. Gee, I thought only white Americans used to enslave people.
Tarzan offers consistent black-and-white naturalism and is sometimes quite unpleasant, as when Tarzan the boy (Gordon Griffith) discovers the skeletons of his dead parents in a hut. Only an hour-long copy of the film is available. Long ago it was heavily cut by the censors, for part of the naturalism consists of Tarzan as a naked boy, and exposure of his penis had to be severely limited.
