For You Tarzan Buffs
Last week, I watched a nice variety of old flicks, starting with the 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man. The most memorable of the screen Tarzans, Johnny Weismueller had already made a name for himself as an Olympic gold-medalist in swimming. In his first outing as the ape man, the lithe young athlete comes across with a marvelous animalism, crouching and sniffing, as cat-like as he is simian. He and Maureen O’Sullivan had that much-vaunted, but not always achieved thing called chemistry. TTAM is absurd, yet still thorougly entertaining. Its first sequel, Tarzan and His Mate, is not only the best of the MGM series, but arguably the best Tarzan film ever made. The climax, in which apes, lions, and elephants engage in a wild melee is not to be missed. Good stuff!
Facts I learned from the documentary accompanying this DVD set include:
**If the famous Tarzan yell (that is to say, the most famous version of the yell) was the product of mixing of various sounds in the studio and not Weismueller’s own creation, he learned to mimic it perfectly. As witnesses testified, in later life he would cheerfully give out with it anywhere, anytime, note perfect.
**Contrary to what many believe, Edgar Rice Burroughs actually liked the MGM Tarzan movies and Weismueller’s performance. He’d been seeing his creation on the screen for a decade-and-a-half in silent films. They rarely got it right. The MGM people determined therefore to merely use the character and not try to adapt Burrough’s Tarzan stories. The arrangement not only pleased Tarzan’s creator, it also made him a lot of money.
**The famous/infamous nude swimming scene in Tarzan and His Mate was inspired by a similar scene in another picture with Joel MacCrae and Delores Del Rio. Tarzan and Jane’s skinny-dip (actually, it was only Jane’s; Tarz kept his loin cloth on) played intact to audiences in pre-selected (more broad-minded?) sections of the country. By 1934, however, the Hays office had more teeth and they clamped down, removing the scene from the film until it was restored in the late 1980s. Maureen O’Sullivan bowed out of this scene in favor of another female swimmer–not because she didn’t wish to appear on camera nude, but she was severely claustrophobic. She could swim but, for her, an extended underwater scene was right out!
**Thinking the story possibilities in their relationship had run their course, the producers wanted to kill off Jane in Tarzan Finds A Son. Two endings were filmed, one in which Jane dies from a spear wound, the other in which she revives. Test audiences reacted quite negatively to the former ending, so…Tarzan kept his mate and his boy!
The third in the series, Tarzan Escapes, was completely filmed but the producers felt it so lacking, they rewrote and reshot the whole thing. It did well, though the added cost of refilming severely reduced profits. Lost, apparently for good, however, is a sequence I’d really like to see: Tarzan and company wading through a quicksand-laced swamp, attacked by giant vampire bats.
If you’re looking for great entertainment for the whole family, pop up some corn, and slip in Johnny Weismueller. See if, next day, your kids aren’t swinging in the trees in the backyard, giving out with Tarzan yells!
