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Every new Hayley Mills film was an exercise in transition. Would audiences allow the successful child star – the first for a generation – to grow up? Or would they turn against her as they had Shirley Temple? And would her paymasters Disney in the penultimate film in her contract assist her by offering more mature roles or insist she remained the cute kid? She had already ventured into more adult territory with the British-made The Chalk Garden (1964).

Set on the island of Crete, what starts out as typical Disney travelog – traditional Greek wedding and annual festival parade – soon morphs into darker sub-Hitchcockian territory. Nikki (Hayley Mills) on holiday with her aunt (Joan Greenwood), a collector of folk songs, becomes mixed up with skin diver Mark (Peter McEnery) who appears to be on the trail of a local man Stratos (Eli Wallach). Young love looks set to blossom except for the villainy afoot. The picture holds on to its various mysteries for too long so exposition comes in a flood in the second act while the third act introduces a new set of characters including British consul (John Le Mesurier) and wealthy yacht owner Madame Habib (legendary silent star Pola Negri).

Along the way some excellent scenes feature: a nerve-tingling high-wire stunt on a revolving windmill, a punch-up on a speeding boat, the drunken wife (Sheila Hancock) of the consul, feral cats in an ancient monument, an old woman thinking she is going crazy when a bottle moves seemingly of its own volition, a hearse doubling as an ambulance, a cowardly leopard and a belter of a slap meted out by Nikki. Mark, physically inhibited by a gunshot wound, has to cede investigation into the nefarious activities to Nikki who in any case has already played the independence card.

Getting all the necessary information to the audience and ensuring various characters are properly introduced without the whole enterprise turning into a turgid mess is a tricky proposition but director James Neilson is equally at home with complicated plot and multi-character scenario from Dr Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963) and with Mills from Summer Magic (1963). And he lets mystery and action take precedence over budding romance, the kiss when it comes hardly going to make an audience swoon, and uses the traditional Greek elements to build up atmosphere.

All in all entertaining enough, especially if viewed as Saturday matinee material, but it’s clear that the leading roles would have worked better if played by older characters as was the case with the source novel by Mary Stewart. Hayley Mills (Pollyanna, 1960) makes a game stab at putting forward a more grown-up persona but relies far too much on the acting tricks that got her into the child-star business in the first place. Even so, once she exerts her independence, she becomes more believable although the idea of a teenager solving a crime creates more problems than it solves in attracting an adult audience.

In his first leading role Peter McEnery (Beat Girl, 1960) impresses. Villainy is a stock in trade for Eli Wallach (The Magnificent Seven, 1960) but here he dials down the brutality. Irene Papas (The Guns of Navarone, 1961) plays his sister and were it not for her husky voice Joan Greenwood  (Tom Jones, 1963) would have been a dead ringer for a dotty aunt. It’s a treat to see a famed silent star Pola Negri (Shadows of Paris, 1924) putting in an appearance. Character actors John Le Mesurier (The Liquidator, 1965), Andre Morrell (The Vengeance of She, 1968) and Sheila Hancock (Night Must Fall, 1964) complete the British contingent. For British television writer Michael Dyne this proved his sole screenplay.

Catch Up: you can follow Hayley Mills’ unfolding career on the Blog through reviews of Pollyanna, In Search of the Castaways (1963), The Truth about Spring (1965), Sky, West and Crooked / The Gypsy Girl (1966), The Trouble with Angels (1966), adult breakthrough The Family Way (1966), Pretty Polly / A Matter of Innocence (1967) and Twisted Nerve (1968).

Fantasy enjoys considerable leeway if its fantastical elements make up for lack of character development and narrative scope. This Jules Verne rip-off – it appeared a few months before Five Weeks in a Balloon – hardly even qualifies as a travelog given the background is simply superimposed and the various locales simplistic in the extreme. And not much point employing condors as a tool of attack unless you’ve got Ray Harryhausen to hand. Even with gorillas and cannibals on the loose and villains putting the heroine on the rack it still falls short of the requirements of a standard Saturday matinee.

Explorer Sir Hubert Warrington (Douglas Kennedy) is imprisoned in darkest Africa for refusing to disclose the whereabouts of the fabled Cleopatra treasure. News of his misfortune reaches London courtesy of a character known only as the Hindu (James Lanphier) who hitches a ride back on a balloon navigated by scientist Dr Joseph Faraday (Marshall Thompson) and carrying as passenger Warrington’s fiancée Ellen (Mala Powers) daughter of financier Sir Adam Burton (Robert Gillette).

Since Ellen is closer in years to Joseph than her fiancé and they are going to be thrown together through trial and tribulation you can assume come journey’s end there might be a tussle among the men for her affections. The Hindu has no intention of helping rescue Warrington since he has been behind his imprisonment. Instead, the Hindu reckons Warrington will spill the beans if he sees his fiancée tortured.

Warrington laughs out loud at such presumption and claims he only romanced Ellen to get backing from her father. But, of course, you reckon, he would say that. Except when she is captured and tortured he doesn’t bat an eyelid. Luckily, this is the kind of picture where guards are easily overcome and escape is a foregone conclusion. Plus, since aforementioned fiancé has proved himself unworthy, the way is clear for a Joseph-Ellen match.

Writer-director Nathan Juran, an Oscar-winner for art direction, has done much better than this.  Siege of the Saxons (1963), First Men on the Moon (1964) and East of Sudan (1964) are all vast improvements on his debut so clearly he learned some lessons. What he needed to brush up on was obvious, better locales, more interesting characters, and more intriguing narrative rather than stock versions of all three.

There’s not much Mala Powers (Fear No More, 1961) or Marshall Thompson (Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion, 1965) can bring to such cliché under-written roles and the Culturally Inappropriate Police would be on the case of James Lanphier.

And, unfortunately, it doesn’t even have enough going for it to earn a place in the much-prized so-bad-it’s-good category.

I watched it so you don’t have to.

This has been lost for decades – and with good reason. Even Katharine Hepburn fresh from an Oscar-winning turn in The Lion in  Winter (1968) can’t save this and to be honest I’m struggling to see why anyone wanted to make it in the first place beyond newcomer Commonwealth United intent on making a splash. That it made nothing of the kind is down to a variety of reasons.

First of all, it’s clearly intended as some kind of broad satire on financiers and the kind of get-rich-quick schemes that prey on the ill-informed. Secondly, you might as well have called it Eccentrics Assemble from the number of oddballs present. Thirdly, director Bryan Forbes (King Rat, 1965) works on the principle that he doesn’t need to explain anything – least of all provide important characters with actual names – because it would all be obvious to an intelligent audience. Lastly, and possibly most important of all, since it doesn’t fit into any obvious genre it just jumps between a bunch of them, including the Absurd.

In fact, some of the better sections are driven by absurd situation or observation. Countess Aurelia – the titular madwoman – points out that the Futures market consists of buying something that doesn’t exist and selling it when it does. A policeman tries to save a man who hasn’t drowned by applying the techniques used to save a person who has drowned. You get the gist? I didn’t.

The basic story concerns a bunch of millionaires attempting to acquire the mineral rights to the land underneath Paris because The Prospector (Donald Pleasance) has discovered oil. Did he drill for it? Did tar deposits rise to the surface? Nope, he has detected the existence of oil by sampling water that has been sourced from the ground.

He involves a bunch of Disparate Anonymites, all designated by occupation or title, thus The Chairman (Yul Brynner), The Reverend (John Gavin), The General (Paul Henreid), The Commissar (Oskar Homolka) and The Broker (Charles Boyer) who spend most of the time sitting outside a café complaining.

The Broker is something of an oddity, being both entrepreneur and revolutionary, all set to direct his nephew Roderick (Richard Chamberlain) to explode a bomb in Paris. Naturally, when this plan fails what else is there for Roderick to do but fall instantly in love with waitress Irene (Nanette Newman).

If this isn’t barmy enough for you, Aurelia is stuck in the past, rereading a newspaper from decades ago, while one of her friends Constance has an invisible dog and another Gabrielle an invisible lover. You can see where this is going. If so, you’re doing better than me.

Aurelia, who gets wind of the scheme from Roderick and The Ragpicker (Danny Kaye), decides to exterminate the financiers by luring them into her cellar. Why she didn’t prevail on Roderick to provide her with another bomb to blow them up is anybody’s guess.

Anyway, before she can do the necessary luring, she conducts a mock trial, finding the financiers guilty of everything that anybody with a scintilla of sense would be fully aware of and hardly need such a heavy-handed lecture.

Everyone comes out of this with egg on their face. The only reason it doesn’t get no stars at all is that anything has to be better than Orgy for the Dead (1965) and Anora (2023) and the only reason it isn’t given the one-star rating of that picture is because Katharine Hepburn is in the cast and even though, as I said, she can’t save it, but I wouldn’t to put her in the same category as the nudie horror.

Bryan Forbes and Oscar-winning screenwriter Edward Anhalt (Becket, 1964) expanded the original play by Jean Giraudoux.

YouTube, where this is showing, clearly believed nobody would get to the end of it because it’s absolutely riddled with adverts, literally one every couple of minutes.

Thirty years later Paul Newman returns to the private eye genre – and finds the well dry. It’s a Hollywood trope that big stars after decades of employing every artifice in the business decide for artistic reasons to fess up and play their age. But the “tired old man” syndrome here is as much a bust as the story and the characters. Susan Sarandon couldn’t have “femme fatale” written on her face in any bigger letters and only the dumbest viewer would not guess from the outset that she had something to do with the mysterious disappearance of her first husband. It’s no surprise that this is so devoid of anything memorable that it is remembered mostly these days for Oscar-winning Reese Witherspoon getting her kit off. 

Worse, despite being second-billed, Gene Hackman hardly appears, no more than topping and tailing the picture. We also have a voice-over that’s not replete with wit but is used to fill us in on bits of the narrative that are either opaque or not obvious enough. And it falls back on the Raymond Chandler gimmick of a man bursting into a room with a gun when the narrative starts to slacken. Except the story here is so slack it’s almost immobile. And there’s just a terrible ongoing joke that everyone thinks (apparently) that Paul Newman has had his pecker shot off, which would explain his general curmudgeonly attitude.

Ex-cop private eye Harry Ross (Paul Newman) is down in Mexico to find the missing daughter Mel Ames (Reese Witherspoon) of old buddy Jack on an illegal sexscapade (she’s a minor) with Jeff (Liev Schreiber). In the process of apprehending her he drops his gun (yep, that’s how good he is at this job) and she picks it up and shoots him. Flash forward a couple of years and Harry’s retired and living in a grace-and-favor apartment supplied by a grateful Jack who is dying of cancer. Harry agrees to come out of retirement to deliver a package for Jack, which obviously contains cash for a blackmail pay-out. Come delivery time, Harry stumbles upon the corpse of another ex-cop, Lester (M. Emmet Walsh), who has continued the search for the missing husband of Jack’s current wife Catherine (Susan Sarandon), a former actress not averse to taking her clothes off onscreen.

Into the equation comes cynical cop Capt Egan (John Spencer) and Verna (Stockard Channing), another old buddy and possibly one-time girlfriend (it’s not clear). Meanwhile, Harry falls for the charms of Catherine since only the dumbest of dumb cops can’t recognize a femme fatale when she falls into his lap. Unfortunately, Jack chooses that moment to have a heart attack and quickly works out from the giveaway of Catherine racing to the rescue wearing Harry’s shirt that he’s been cuckolded.

The trail doesn’t exactly lead to another old buddy, Raymond (James Garner), but he gets involved and another red alert flashes on the screen when we learn that Jack owns a million-dollar house (multi-million dollar equivalent these days) that even in his financially-straitened condition he refuses to sell for the obvious reason – as it takes forever for the audience to discover – that the corpse of the missing husband is buried in the grounds.

Jeff, who’s done a four-year stretch for his sojourn in Mexico with Mel, has worked this out and in conjunction with parole officer Gloria (Margo Martindale) is putting the squeeze on Jack. But he’s pretty miffed with Harry and knocks him out. But he’s also as dumb as the rest of the gang and is hiding out in the unsold million-dollar house. So he’s not hard to track down. And not just by Harry but also by the aforementioned character who bursts through a door with a gun when the narrative goes slack.

So, shucks, eventually we learn what we knew from the outset, that Catherine had her first husband bumped off so she could marry Jack and he was complicit. You might not have worked out that Raymond was somehow involved but what the heck there needs to be some twist in the turgid tale.

Naturally, Harry, being a retired cop and private eye now resigned to the vagaries of life, isn’t particularly concerned with putting away Catherine and in any case, as luck would have it, turns out Verna is still sweet on him so they can walk away into the sunset.

Crikey! And this from triple Oscar-winning writer-director Robert Benton (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967 and Kramer vs Kramer 1979). If it’s intended as a parody of the genre, there ain’t much in the way of laffs and if it’s not then, sorry, that’s the way it’s turned out.

Sure it’s world-weary and all that, and Harry is a sad divorced ex-alcoholic who’s very down on his luck, and while there is some brittle dialog it’s not enough to make up for the sludge of the narrative trek.

Yep, Paul Newman (Harper, 1966) comes across as old and Gene Hackman (The Gypsy Moths, 1969) comes across as old and James Garner (Buddwing, 1966) comes across as old but is that it? Honestly? Worse, Oscar-winning Susan Sarandon comes up short in the femme fatale department. You wouldn’t figure Reese Witherspoon either as a superstar in the making. In fact, the droll Margo Martindale steals the show.

This pretty much put the tin lid on the career of Paul Newman as a top-billed star – and it’s worth pointing out that both Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood in that marquee regard went on longer – as it did on the directing career of Robert Benton.

Must’ve seemed a good idea at the time.

The most expensive trailer ever made. Setting up in the very last scene the character of Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), straight out of Peaky Blinders, and his gang, who, presumably, are the main characters of the sequel. And, for sure, they are a big improvement on the iodine-doused philosophy-spouting Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who has built the skull pillar used in all the advertising.

This is the kind of horror film that doesn’t just want to be another zombie picture. You can argue that the “infected” once killed do stay dead but they don’t appear to be aware that most of the time they rampage around just like zombies, so it’s a fairly moot point. Meanwhile, the director makes umpteen points about conservation in a Fisherman’s Friend type of village where the one thing, judging from the party scene, they are never going to run out of is home-made booze. Despite the conservation message, the survivors are happy to desecrate the forests for fuel.

You could have the written the plot on a pinhead. Young lad Spike (Alfie Williams) makes his bones killing an infected. Not that hard since it’s the size of a giant slug and can hardly move. The conservation message seems lost on young Spike since he burns some essential house to the ground to create a diversion, something so essential it’s going to make the guards guarding the causeway abandon their posts while he escapes the village.

And although, nearly three decades on from the original adventures in this saga, the world has changed – would you believe it, there’s such a thing as mobile phones and cosmetic surgery (information drop courtesy of a wandering shipwrecked Swedish sailor) – it seems that breast cancer was also unknown back in the day and Jamie’s addled mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is so addled that even in her moments of clarity hasn’t realized that those strange lumps all over her body are cancer.

Anyways, luckily, she’s an obliging soul and rather than put her son through the agony of watching her dying, she elects for assisted dying, courtesy of the good doctor. And boy that kid is some kid, and in the barmiest scene in the whole movie, goes along with the barmy notion that he let the doc chop off his mum’s head and boil up her skull so he (Spike, that is) can stick it atop the skull pyramid.

Did I mention there was a baby? My guess is Jodie Comer took the part on the basis of the scene where she bonds with the pregnant infected woman, helping her through her incredibly speedy labor, presumably speedy birth being an unknown side effect of infection.

Another side effect is that infected babies don’t cry, which is heck of a useful when you are trying to hide in the woods or the wilderness from the scavenging monsters, including the aptly-named Samson, who can tear heads (and attached spinal column) off with his bare hands and since he is permitted to survive my guess is he’s turn up again in the sequel.

The baby might even be some nod to virgin birth for all I know, the only child born uninfected. I only mention that because as well as the cod philosophy there’s a dose of cod spirituality, the Angel of the North statue brought into the equation for no apparent reason.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, at one point a contender for the vacant James Bond slot, does very little except roister and upset his son by indulging in a bit of adultery. It’s all very Robin Hood what with the emphasis on bow-and-arrow as the weapon of choice, and just to show how effective they are in case we’re not paying attention and seeing how easily they kill off the infected punters, every now and then director Danny Boyle chucks in a clip from I guess Henry V which shows how effective a hail of arrows can be, though anyone paying attention to any Ridley Scott historical picture would be aware of this.

There’s a note on immigration as well. Britain is quarantined, so no Brits can emigrate abroad, European patrol boats operating in the North Sea and presumably the English Channel to deter anyone setting off in a dinghy, the opposite of the current situation.

Waste of an otherwise talented cast – Jodie Comer (The Last Duel, 2021), Aaron Taylor- Johnson (Kraven the Hunter, 2024) and Alfie Williams in his big role debut.

Directed by Danny Boyle (Yesterday, 2019) and written by Alex Garland (Civil War, 2024) too determined to make points at the expense of going to the trouble of creating an involving story.

Complete absence of thrills, I’m afraid, and too much preaching.

Every now and then I get a notion to see what happened to  ingénues who made an initial splash. In El Dorado (1967) there were three. We all know how James Caan’s career panned out though he had a tricky time of it working his way through low-budgeters like Submarine X-1 (1968) and Journey to Shiloh (1968) graduating to arthouse flops like The Rain People (1969) before making his box office bones in The Godfather (1972). Christopher George I’ve had a look at in The Thousand Plane Raid (1969) and another picture tomorrow.

Michele Carey, James Caan’s squeeze in the Henry Hathaway western, didn’t have the same luck or anyone showing her anything like the same perseverance in her talent. So when I came across this item it looked as if she had found her first top-billed role and since it also featured cult figures Henry Silva (Johnny Cool, 1969) and Keenan Wynn (Point Blank, 1967) I reckoned it was worth a peak.

It was the first rape-revenge movie, with the victim hunting down her attackers, a subgenre that picked up more heft when Raquel Welch headlined Hannie Caulder later that year. But it also seems close cousin to Will Penny (1968) and The Stalking Moon (1969) where the inarticulate make a connection. There’s also racism, “filthy heathen” Native Americans automatically landed with blame, and a rape every bit as savage as Straw Dogs (1971) and an ironically raw ending. But there’s also bits missing, either edited out or never filmed in the first place, leaving large gaps in the narrative failing to explain how the hunters manage to track down the hunted who have ridden off to disparate places. In fact, there’s two sets of hunters, the second bunch not quite sure who it is they’re chasing.

Schoolteacher Alice (Michele Carey) is on the same stagecoach as prisoner Pudge (Keenan Wynn) when it is bushwhacked by the outlaw’s four-strong gang. Everyone else is slaughtered but Pudge and his men make off with sacks of gold and the woman. Staking her out they take turns raping her and then leave her to die.

Native American Chatto (Henry Silva) saves her, nurses her back to health, kits her out in fresh hand-made clothing and teaches her how to fire a rifle, in the course of which romance burgeons (though you might wonder, psychologically, if it’s too soon for a woman raped five times to want anything to do with a man).

Meanwhile, a posse headed by Sheriff Pierce (John Anderson) is searching for the missing stagecoach. When they find the remains of Alice’s clothing and the stakeout, the assumption is this was the work of the Apaches. Since the running time is a lean 84-minutes, Chatto and Alice make short work of tracking down the outlaws, who have, by this point, not yet split up.

Catching them unawares, they, for reasons best known to the screenwriter, allow most of them to escape. Alice, whose marksmanship is not quite up to the mark, nonetheless is capable of putting a bullet in a barrel of gunpowder. One down, four to go.

The sheriff does them a good turn and apprehends the next outlaw (they’ve split up by now) and is questioning him about Pudge when the couple appear and Alice, with vastly improved marksmanship, shoots him from a longer range. The posse, which had previously proved adept at tracking, allows the pair to escape.

In due course, Alice and companion manage to find all the others bar Pudge, one meeting his end on a toilet seat, blasted by his own shotgun, little marksmanship required by her there. Pudge has had the clever notion of hiding out in plain sight by signing on as a cowhand for a herd on the move. Still, for reasons undiscerned, Alice finds him asleep in the dead of night. He’s apprehended, whisked away, but escapes and it’s left to Chatto to bring him back. Pudge is staked out and Alice cuts off his testicles, though she’s kind of shocked at her own savagery. Chatto puts the murdering rapist out of his misery.

But the posse, which for unexplained reasons, happens to be passing, hears the gunshots and comes across Alice in a state of shock beside the Apache hovering over the corpse. The sheriff shoots Chatto while she does nothing to save him. Which is a hell of a note, even given her state of shock, but maybe shacking up with an Apache was deemed worse than being raped by white men and maybe she did that just to ensure she had a protector.

There may be an even more ironic ending being hinted at because – as the camera pulls back from the dead man and the shocked woman and the posse – into view comes a tribe of Apaches watching.

So quite an odd one, good use of the widescreen, but too many scenes of just horsemen riding, and little in the way of characterization. Worth it to see the really nasty side of Keenan Wynn and Henry Silva at his most monosyllabic hero. Hard to put your finger on what’s amiss with Michele Carey’s performance. She could be playing numb, as she had every right to do, given the treatment she endured, but she doesn’t give much away emotionally even when taking revenge or when not saving her savior.

Director Ron Joy only made this one picture as did screenwriter Richard Bakalyan, better known as an actor. The rape scene is well done, filmed from Alice’s POV, a jumble of male faces straining up close, so less of an actress ordeal than Straw Dogs, though the mauling and pawing prior to the act must have been hard for an actress to take.

But you do have to wonder at the filming of this scene – as with The General’s Daughter (1999) – of the real-life vulnerability of the actress and, setting aside any acting skill, the possibility of her feeling humiliated, staked out stark naked not just for the perpetrators to slaver over but the entire (most likely male) crew.

Didn’t prove a breakout out role for Michele Carey. She didn’t make another movie for six years and then it was a bit part in The Choirboys (1977).

Currently on YouTube.

It’s easy to forget that the main purpose of the Pressbook/Marketing Manual is simply to provide a cinema manager which a range of advertisements in various sizes that they can cut out and take along to their local newspaper to be reproduced, plus a synopsis of the picture, list of the cast, billing credits and that other essential – running time. Most Pressbooks were not upscale A3 or even A2, printed in color, with fold-outs, and running to 20-plus pages with extensive cast bios, journalistic snippets and promotional ideas.

They were produced long before the movies went into release, sent out weeks or even months in advance, as a studio promotional tool, to lure cinema managers into booking the picture. Big studios employed marketing teams or farmed the job out to PR specialists before there was a finished film to view – and even that might be considered too time-consuming a task.

So there was a fair chance marketeers were working from a synopsis. And no guarantee they would even have the time to read that. For a picture like Tarzan and the Great River, there were obvious default promotional ideas – tie-ups with travel agencies, or camera stores for people to submit photos of their travels, or lobby gimmicks.

But it’s not going to help your chances if you – as the cinema manager – haven’t read the synopsis either and plan your promotional agenda on the information available in the “Exploitation Tips” section of this particular Pressbook.

Out of seven such ideas, three assume the movie is set in Africa rather than South America. So camera stores, whose managers wouldn’t have seen the synopsis either and were relying on the cinema manager’s advice, might end up asking customers to submit photos “suggesting African scenes.” Similarly, travel agencies would be instructed to “take advantage of the African background” to organise a window display “with African tour backgrounds.” You would be ordering in safari outfits for the ushers to wear or find African motifs to decorate the lobby.

Outside of these blatant errors, the advertising agency had done a good job of trying to reposition Tarzan’s public image. He was now “America’s Number One Hero” in possibly an attempt to challenge James Bond.

To interest editors, the marketers compiled a list of other athletes turned actors. Current Tarzan Mike Henry had been a “bruising line-backer” with the Los Angeles Rams and the Pittsburgh Steels. The villain of Tarzan and the Great River is played by decathlon champion Rafer Johnson. John Wayne and Jim Brown had also been pro footballers.

Babe Ruth put in  a screen appearance, playing himself, in Pride of the Yankees (1942) starring Gary Cooper. Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris played themselves and for a full-length feature in  Safe at Home (1962). Former Rams star Elroy Hirsch also played himself, but this more than a cameo, as he was the star of his biopic Crazylegs, All-American (1953). Subsequently, he starred in the non-sports offerings Unchained (1955) and Zero Hour (1957)

With not much to interest the newspapers in Mike Henry beyond beefcake photos, the marketeers majored on producer Sy Weintraub, who had begun his career in television syndication, and was credited with originating the concept of the “Late Show.” As president of Motion Pictures for Television, he ushered in the gold rush of buying up old movies for small screens. He also owned a TV and radio station, but he sold up all these interests to finance the purchase of the rights to Tarzan in 1958.

Tarzan had been around for so long on the silver screen that one of the more interesting promotional ideas was to offer a free ticket to anyone who could recall seeing the first Tarzan Elmo Lincoln  back in 1918..

The advertising taglines emphasized danger: “barehanded combat with a wild jaguar,” “vicious man-eating piranhas,” “blazing volcano”, “savage tribes,” and “risking his life to save his woman.” It was rather a bold claim that the picture offered “more heart-stopping adventure than anything on the screen now.”

While the Pressbook was A3 in size, it was limited to just six pages. There were only two advertisements rather than the half-dozen-plus that were common. Having said that, the character must already have been imprinted on the public mind so possibly there was little point trying to say more.