When we were leaving the Ioka after Tarzan’s Savage Fury, Aunt Abigail said, “Tarzan is more chimp than human.”

“I feel for Jane!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

Lex Barker’s last Tarzan film (Tarzan and the She-Devil) was in 1953. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan took me to the Ioka to see it. This was the first time I’d ever been in a movie theater with them. Once again, Nora wasn’t in town. Now eighteen, she might have been at Mount Holyoke already.

I would have been surprised by my uncles’ behavior at the Ioka, if Nora hadn’t forewarned me.

“My dad and Uncle Johan are weird—they think everything is a comedy, even tragedies,” Nora had told me.

“Is that a Norwegian thing?” I asked her.

“It’s just a weird thing, Adam,” Nora insisted. “They laugh all the way through most movies.”

Maybe that was why Henrik didn’t come with us to see Tarzan and the She-Devil, which was not a comedy—at least not intentionally. Or Henrik had decided he was too old for Tarzan movies.

The evil ivory hunters burn Tarzan’s tree hut, and capture Tarzan and Jane. Tarzan takes the elephants’ side, opposed to ivory poaching. Tarzan summons the elephants; they stampede, trampling the villainous Raymond Burr. Lyra, the She-Devil, gets shot. Cheetah, the chimpanzee, provides the only comic relief—he gets caught stealing ostrich eggs. Yet Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan roared with laughter at everything. Parents with small children changed their seats, distancing themselves from the North Conway Norwegians’ crazed howls. Jane, held captive by the ivory hunters, provoked the loudest guffaws from Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan.

They were still laughing when we left the Ioka. “Almost as funny as foreign films, Adam,” Uncle Martin, Nora’s father, told me.

“The ones with subtitles,” Uncle Johan, Henrik’s dad, chimed in.

“I’ve never seen a movie you have to read,” I pointed out to them politely. Films with subtitles never came to the Ioka.

“We’ll soon remedy that!” Uncle Martin shouted.

“There’s a French film coming to the Franklin next week, Adam. French films are hysterical,” Uncle Johan told me.

I knew Nora would have assured me that not all French films were hysterical, but I was eager to see a foreign film with subtitles—even (perhaps especially) a tragedy.

Thus, because I saw Tarzan and the She-Devil with my uncles, I was invited to go with them to the Franklin Theatre in Durham to see my first foreign-language film with subtitles. I knew about the Franklin from Nora; her dad and Uncle Johan had taken her to see foreign films there. The University of New Hampshire was in Durham. It was a college town, and the Franklin was the nearest art-house movie theater around.