It’s easy to forget the scene is actually played for laughs – the sexual daydream of Dudley Moore’s midlife crisis-stricken composer, framed like a naff commercial of some nose-assaulting Seventies odour. Up there with Ursula Andress emerging from the sea, Raquel Welch’s fur bikini, and the Farrah Fawcett poster, it’s a defining image that immediately transformed Derek into a “sex symbol” – a term that in 2020 seems perilously outdated. “I never, ever run.”īut it remains the scene for which Bo Derek, now 63, is best remembered. Go back! Run again,” writer-director Blake Edwards told her. Once in Mexico, where the scene is set, and twice again in Hawaii.
FUN FACT! United Artists was sued by the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate over the film.With her hair braided into cornrows and her body barely covered by a skin-colour swimsuit (as much as one’s body can be covered by a skin-colour swimsuit that goes near-transparent when wet), Bo Derek’s famous scene from the sex comedy 10 – a slow-motion, star-making run along the beach – had to be filmed on three different occasions. Overall, "Tarzan the Ape Man" is about as bad a film as can be made (I hope Richard Harris was paid handsomely for appearing), but it's sooooooooo bad, that it's absolutely worth watching, which is why I suppose Turner Classic Movies chose to air this unintentional laugh riot. These scenes were all likely intended to be titillating, but similarly to "Showgirl," they are anything but.
Oh, and over the end credits, Bo is pawed by a real ape, an orangutan, which I'm hoping was some sort of nod to the 70s/80s ape cycle of comedies (i.e "Every Which Way But Loose," "Going Ape," "BJ and the Bear," etc.). Aother scene has Tarzan rescuing Jane from a tribe of natives who roughly wash her and then cover her in mud, which I'm assuming director John Derek (Bo's husband) meant to be erotic. High points of camp include Tarzan pawing at Jane in a very odd early courtship scene. Pretty, but talentless Bo Derek plays Jane. "Tarzan the Ape Man" is so awful that it does achieve Ed Wood/Showgirls levels of so-bad-it's-good, which makes this film essential viewing for fans of bad cinema. Instead of this being a story about a man who was raised by apes, it's a story about the sexual awakening of Jane, and it's a ludicrously awful awakening. Edgar Rice Burroughs is reduced to softcore porn.
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