Hopefully this release is just the beginning of a new series of WAC Tarzan remasters.  The original pre-Code classic has everything we want: innocent/lustful sex in the jungle, terrific work from Johnny Weissmuller & Maureen O’Sullivan, bloody savagery . . . plus race attitudes stuck in the white supremacist 19th century. The monkey acrobatics and animal mayhem are non-stop. You TOO will see the dreaded Mutia Escarpment, and the forbidden Lost Elephant’s Graveyard!  Olympic swimmer Weissmuller scores big as the sound era’s first bare-chested pulp action hero. Watch out for that Tree!

Tarzan the Ape Man
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1932 / B&W /1:37 Academy / 100 min. / Available at MovieZyng / Street Date December 12, 2023 / 21.99
Starring: Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, Neil Hamilton, C. Aubrey Smith, Doris Lloyd, Forrester Harvey, Ivory Williams, Ray Corrigan, Billy Curties, Johnny Eck, Angelo Rossito.
Cinematography: Clyde de Vinna, Harold Rosson
Second Unit Directors: Nick Grinde, Arthur Rose
Visual Effects: Warren Newcombe
Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Film Editors: Tom Held, Ben Lewis
Original Music: George Richelavie?
Written by Cyril Hume, Ivor Novello from characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Executive producer: Irving Thalberg
Produced by (Bernard Hyman)
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke

No, we’re not going to load down a 90 year-old classic with PC sermonizing. Native Americans were frequently afforded respect in Hollywood adventures, a gesture seldom offered to characters of African descent. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ popular Dark Continent fantasy treats Africa as a colonial domain where white men represent everything civilized. In the early MGM Tarzans, black natives might as well be wildlife — they’re either terrified safari porters or bizarre distortions of white prejudices. MGM hired dozens of dwarves to represent African pygmies. Covered in black body paint, they’re more grotesque than the sideshow denizens of Tod Browning’s Freaks.

Are PC trigger warnings cooked up just to make corporate attorneys feel more secure?  The Warner Archive’s presentation of Tarzan the Ape Man begins with a carefully worded disclaimer card that makes us wonder if we’re supposed to be ashamed for watching.

Newer versions of the Tarzan ethos — even an animated version by Disney — soften and sanitize the old jungle formula. It’s still an Anglo fantasy, an excuse to pit a white hero against a savage world. There had been silent Tarzans, and other sound Tarzans, even as MGM’s Johnny Weissmuller dominated screens across the globe. The MGM films are too exciting, too well-made and too historically important to be marginalized as ‘invalid,’ even if the generation that first loved them is fading fast. Tarzan became Camp in the 1960s, but is now ready for a full re-evaluation. We love this first series entry: Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan are fresh and captivating pre-Code legends, and the movies retain a weird innocence that still appeals.

In West Africa, 1910, trader and big game hunter James Parker (C. Aubrey Smith) gets a big surprise — as he preps for a daring safari into uncharted territory, the daughter he never knew shows up — Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan). Proving herself a crack shot, Jane is allowed to accompany the safari, much to the admiring approval of James’s partner Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton). Parker Sr.’s goal is to find the legendary Elephants’ Graveyard, and reap a treasure in ivory. To do that they must climb the forbidding ‘Mutia Escarpment,’ and deal with hostile natives that worship the entire region as sacred ground.

What foo-paw did Jane commit in London society?  She says she never wants to return to civilization, which is providential considering who she meets atop the tropical mountain. The jungle man Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) saves them from rampaging hippopotomi, which we assured are the very worst kind. Tarzan likes what he sees, and carries Jane off to his roost among the apes, high in the jungle trees. They can’t communicate, but there’s definite chemistry, even as Tarzan’s love pats give Jane bruises.

Various violent scenes and misunderstandings later, Jane and Tarz are splitsville, and she’s back with Daddy-O and Harry. Even Tarzan thinks that maybe Jane doesn’t belong in his monkeyshines world. Hangdog Harry  intuits that he can’t compete with the vine-swinging Adonis. Just when a plot complication is needed, the three white intruders are captured by savage pygmies, and prepared for ritual slaughter. Jane has managed to send an SOS to Tarzan through the Lord of the Jungle’s chimpanzee helper Cheetah (John Gielgud). A major rescue sequence pits Tarzan against an entire tribe, and leads to a life and death battle with a pit monster. The capper is an onslaught by Tarzan’s elephant allies.

Tarzan the Ape Man partly sprouted from a desire by MGM to amortize thousands of feet of outtakes from the previous year’s Trader Horn, an expensive film actually shot in Africa. The Tarzan thriller was reportedly filmed in a big hurry by ‘one take’ Woody Van Dyke, on sets built to match the earlier picture as much as possible. That may account for the film’s slightly overexposed daytime look, and the frequent use of vignette filters to blur the edges of the frame. The film also makes extensive use of MGM’s private zoo, where real apes and a rhino were trained for use in the film. Some of the shots with ape-Weissmuller interactions are truly impressive.

There are lots of fake apes on view — paging Ray Corrigan!  Anatomically-incorrect crocodiles have jaws that hinge open like trap doors. It appears that cooperative Indian elephants have been enhanced with fake African ears and sometimes tusks. Energetic second-unit direction fills the screen with (for 1932) realistic jungle animals in action. Tarzan will later be known as a friend of the ecosystem, but in these first films he’s forever stabbing every beast in sight with his Really Big Knife. Who does his knife sharpening?  Rear-projection tricks and other illusions place the actors in front of African stock footage, but Weissmuller occasionally wrestles a real beast, hopefully something de-clawed. He certainly gets a physical workout, as does the circus performer that flies through the jungle on those 40-foot vines.

Wait wait wait . . . this vine-swinging business . . . is a place-holder for SEX!

As a romance, Tarzan the Ape Man is essentially a rape fantasy. Lovely Maureen O’Sullivan (Hannah and her Sisters) is tickled pink to be carried off by the big naked he-man, not to the Casbah but instead to a bug-infested treetop nest. Tarzan has difficulty learning names. When he isn’t punching her black and blue they swing through the forest on vines and poorly-disguised trapezes. We do get a fairly overt fade out to a lo-o-ong hold on a black screen, followed by a morning-after Jane in very-satisfied mode. This being a pre-Code romp, we easily understand that they’ve done the deed. And their relationship is ‘without benefit of clergy’ . . . Hollywood obviously needs an outside censor.

80% of Maureen O’Sullivan’s dialogue is screaming for help, calling out Tarzan! Eeek! and Father! Eeek!  We notice that she never once calls out for help from the halfway decent Harry Holt. He soon gets the message that Jane prefers a Free Range bed partner, preferably one raised by simians. Neil Hamilton, previously a major leading man, brings dignity to the thankless role. His career redemption would have to wait 34 years, for the Batman TV show.

Giant hunk Johnny Weissmuller has muscles but isn’t musclebound — he’s a lean & mean sex symbol for girls and a virile role model for boys. Tarzan’s ‘jungle call’ is a real winner, with its jungle-Germanic yodel. Vintage movie matinees must have resounded with applause and cheers whenever Tarzan came to the rescue, trumpeting that call. The only time in The Ape Man that the call doesn’t work, is when Tarzan yodels it while swimming and dunking his head. Nobody’s perfect.

1930s matinee kids could believe that their screen heroes had The Right Stuff for the job, and Weissmuller’s Tarzan definitely delivers the action goods. Weissmuller indeed looks barefoot when dashing through the brush, which even in the wilds of L.A.’s Culver City would chew up one’s tootsies pretty fast. One scene shows Tarzan swimming faster than Jane can run on the riverbank. The wildest shot shows a friendly elephant transporting the unconscious Tarzan. The angle makes it look as though an elephant is carrying Weissmuller by holding his head in his mouth.

Africa Screams!

Never, NEVER take a job as a porter in a safari movie. The Parker expedition’s black porters entertain us by being killed left and right. They’re shot with arrows, masticated by lions and tossed off thousand-foot cliffs.  When Tarzan gets mad at the expedition, he expresses his anger by killing an innocent black porter as well. Even the pygmies discriminate on racial lines:  the white intruders are saved in the finale because the perverted pygmy savages choose to kill several brave hired blacks first. The pygmies suffer too, in sadistic shots of elephants pulling them from huts and stomping on them.

Tarzan really comes into his own when attacking the giant pit monster (some kind of ape-thing). Weissmuller’s murderous grimace is downright scary. The monster is repeatedly slashed and then stabbed in the face . . . either this remaster restores a few frames of violence, or the improved image lets us see it more clearly.

The Lost Elephant Graveyard is just the kind of ‘magical’ nonsense that Edgar Rice Burroughs turned into legend. The pachyderm boneyard is indeed a peculiar concept. The idea is that every mortally wounded elephant instinctually wanders there to die, apparently from anywhere in Africa. Nobody ever explains how the giant animals climb the Mutia Escarpment, a sheer cliff face that Burroughs (or the screenwriters) seem to have borrowed from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. MGM’s optical department appoints the movie with nine or ten excellent matte paintings, to lend scale to the tall cliffs. The Lost Graveyard becomes a ‘hole in the wall’ canyon accessible only through a waterfall.

As if today’s ‘civilization’ isn’t MORE savage.

Classic adventure of the late 19th and early 20th centuries stemmed from the colonial trend of poking around less-developed lands in search of profit or glory. If you want to thrash an old movie that sends The Wrong Message for 2024, you’ll find plenty to complain about here. Even when being benign, these early Tarzan pictures depict the Third World as a mass of degenerate tribes killing each other in gruesome ways. Their only hope lies in the wisdom and civilization of the White Man. Yet the whites sometimes offer sentiments about the superiority of the jungle over civilization.

Or, we can enjoy the film’s deliriously romantic pre-Code Sex Fantasy. When the Code Administration came in, Tarz & Jane ‘sort of’ got married and adopted a son. The fantasy’s erotic trimmings were replaced with cute treehouse interior decor and Flintstones-like modern conveniences. The first two pictures in MGM’s series retain the savage & dangerous woo-hoo sex relationship. The Jungle Lovers have real chemistry, too. Happy Jane beams with joy in between looks that say “Take me you tropical hunk.”  Monosyllabic Tarzan is a savage jungle killer, but also a real gent, tamed by old-fashioned heterosexual lust. Tarzan the Ape Man is our favorite pre-Code sex fantasy, a celebration of co-habitation outside the rules.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Tarzan the Ape Man Is the best we’ve seen this classic, that once circulated in murky 16mm prints. The 1930 film stock and the shooting style (those daytime filters) don’t render tones all that different from the earlier DVD. But the movie looks much sharper, has no blemishes or frame jumps, and the optical transitions are much smoother. The audio is improved as well, highlighting the un-attributed Tarzan theme that we so readily recognize. The IMDB IDs it as Voo-Doo Dance by one George Richelavie, arranged by Paul Marquandt and Fritz Stahlberg.

The WAC tosses in two mind-numbing Merrie Melody cartoons, plus the big Rudy Behlmer-hosted documentary on everything Tarzan that we first saw on Warner’s 2004 Tarzan Collection DVD set. Bona fide film historian Behlmer passed away in 2019. He covers the Burroughs background and mystique, and spreads out with a good overview of other screen Tarzans over the decades.

If this indeed just the beginning of a WAC Tarzan series, we can’t wait for a restored Tarzan and His Mate, a scandalous pre-Code sequel that pushes both the violence and eroticism to Depression-era extremes. And can we still dream of a rediscovery of the alternate ‘Giant Vampire Attack’ version of 1936’s Tarzan Escapes?  We know it existed because prints showed up accidentally during a 1954 re-issue.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Tarzan the Ape Man
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Very Good +
Sound: Very Good +
Supplements:
Documentary Tarzan Silver Screen King of the Jungle with Rudy Behlmer
Merrie Melodies I Wish I Had Wings and Moonlight for Two
Original trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: January 7, 2024
(7055tarz)

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

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