AllMovie

With a blondish wig, a loincloth, and the kind of makeup they used to call "bole-armenia," 11-year-old Gordon Griffith played Elmo Lincoln as a child in Tarzan and the Apes, thus becoming the screen's first Tarzan and the answer to one of those trick trivia questions. Already a veteran performer at the young age of six, Griffith had been one of comedy producer Mack Sennett's Keystone Kids and had played a newsboy in the first slapstick feature, the legendary Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914). He became a star as the preteen King of the Jungle, however, one reviewer describing the youngster as "a youthful actor of uncommon gifts." Huckleberry Finn inevitably followed, with Gordon in the title role, and he was the young Korak, aka The Son of Tarzan, in the 1922 serial. As it was for so many of his predecessors, stardom proved fleeting and he was playing small supporting roles at the advent of sound. Retiring from acting after a couple of cheap serials in the mid-'30s, Griffith instead went behind the camera, functioning variously as a production assistant, assistant director, production manager, producer, and in the case of the European-lensed Alexander the Great (1956), executive producer. His death in 1958 was attributed to a heart attack.