Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan Movie Is A
National titles and set 67 world records, and by all indications, never lost a swimming race.He would go on to a career in film, and became known as the definitive Tarzan, portraying the famous character in 12 different movies from 1932 until 1948. The movie is a huge success and launches a series of Tarzan movies featuring the sexiest couple in the jungle. Share 100 Years Ago Today: Johnny Weissmuller Makes His Competitive Swimming Debut on Pinterest Submit 100 Years Ago Today: Johnny Weissmuller Makes His Competitive Swimming Debut to Reddit Tweet 100 Years Ago Today: Johnny Weissmuller Makes His Competitive Swimming Debut Share 100 Years Ago Today: Johnny Weissmuller Makes His Competitive Swimming Debut on FacebookHe played the character in 12 films and also invented the world famous Tarzan yell, which is still used to provide a Shout-Out to him when performing a Vine. Share 100 Years Ago Today: Johnny Weissmuller Makes His Competitive Swimming Debut on LinkedInAugust 6, 1921—a pioneer embarks on his journey in the pool at the American Athletic Union Championships. Tarzan’s Secret Treasure was directed by Richard Thorpe, and starred Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, with Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane and Johnny Sheffield as Boy. The story begins when Boy’s life is saved by a safari party that encounters Tarzan’s territory while searching for a lost city and its riches.Find the perfect Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan stock photos and editorial news pictures from Getty Images.
This is how Burroughs describes Kala’s rescuing the baby from the fury of the male ape who kills Tarzan’s father and has already killed her infant: When the king ape released the limp form which had once been John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, he turned his attention toward the little cradle, but Kala was there before him, and when he would have grasped the child she snatched it herself, and before he could intercept her she had bolted through the door and taken refuge in a high tree.As she took up the little live baby of Alice Clayton she dropped the dead body of her own into the empty cradle for the wail of the living had answered the call of universal motherhood within her wild breast which the dead could not still.High up among the branches of a mighty tree she hugged the shrieking infant to her bosom, and soon the instinct that was as dominant in this fierce female as it had been in the breast of his tender and beautiful mother—the instinct of mother love—reached out to the tiny man-child’s half-formed understanding, and he became quiet.Then hunger closed the gap between them, and the son of an English lord and an English lady nursed at the breast of Kala, the great ape.Overwritten, even flowery, that passage is an argument for why “good writing” is less important to good novels than emotional commitment and narrative verve. At times the novel reads something like Dickens turned red in tooth and claw, nowhere more so than in the remarkable scene following the death of Tarzan’s parents in which he, as an infant, is adopted by Kala, the great ape who, after the death of her own baby, will raise him as her own. The enduring power of Burroughs’s romance has to do with this refusal to separate savagery from sentimentality. He is in fact Lord Greystoke, born in the jungle when his parents are put ashore by the mutineers who have taken over the ship on which they are passengers.
There’s a wonderful moment in Tarzan and His Mate in which Tarzan, wounded by an evil hunter, falls unconscious beneath the surface of a lake. And it doesn’t take anything special in the way of brains or integrity to flaunt your moral superiority to eighty-year-old cultural artifacts.Tarzan the Ape Man and especially Tarzan and His Mate make space for the animals to shine alongside the human cast, and in some cases, outshine them. On the other hand, the white hunters are the villains. (Hilariously, the Pygmies who figure in the climax of Tarzan the Ape Man stage a pre-killing ceremony that looks like a dress rehearsal for the scene in Gremlins where the creatures lay blissful siege to a neighborhood movie theater during a screening of Snow White.) Yes, the movies casually show the brutality that the white hunters exercise over their black bearers. Yes, the natives are divided between the good subservient ones ready to help the white men and the bad, bloodthirsty ones determined to turn the white interlopers into dinner or household furnishings.
Those things are inseparable from the jungle world the movie is showing us. There’s a special horror to the moment, the utilitarian cruelty of it so much worse than the animal attacks and native rampages elsewhere in the movies. And he’s so determined to find the ivory that he shoots an elephant to follow the dying creature to its resting place.
That pleasure is always mitigated by putting either Jane or Tarzan in danger alongside them, almost as if, without the fate of characters we care about hanging in the balance, we would too easily be able to indulge our sadistic joy in watching the series’ various bwanas get theirs.Nowhere do these exemplars of civilization seem more deluded about their place in the world than in their attempts to woo Jane away from Tarzan. But tucked away beneath the surface of the films is the unspoken promise that sooner or later we are going to have the pleasure of seeing these stuffed shirts get it. Van Dyke, brought to The Thin Man, another adaptation saved by the charm and chemistry of the leads. These are the old-boy sorts who roam the world as if every place were just an outpost of their club, some locations featuring dreadfully substandard accommodations, but then, what can you expect of savages? It can be a drag sitting through these scenes while you wait for Weissmuller to show up—especially in the first movie, which has the same pokey pace the director, W.S. The hunters come in two varieties—dim and affable Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton, later Commissioner Gordon in Batman) in both films, and dim and venal Martin Arlington (Paul Cavanagh) in Tarzan and His Mate. Tarzan the Ape Man 1932 poster (click to enlarge)In these first two Tarzan movies, civilization, embodied by the (always English) white hunters, almost always comes off as constipated and clueless when not downright brutal.
Walking around in his loincloth, with what, in the ’30s, must have seemed impossibly long and unruly hair, Weissmuller is winningly unselfconscious, and a natural gentle-spirited comedian, which suits the character beautifully. Johnny Weissmuller, the former Olympic gold-medal swimmer, firm and trim without having that hard muscled look, is simply one of the most beautiful men to ever step before a movie camera. So the joke becomes watching these two Drones Club refugees playing that game so beloved of the disappointed male suitor: What Does She See in Him? And because we in the audience can see, the answer is obvious. She does the requisite cooing but declares her intention of staying with Tarzan.
Tarzan and His Mate 1934 poster art (click to enlarge)“There’s quite a difference, isn’t there?” Jane says in Tarzan the Ape Man, as Tarzan compares his huge hand with hers. That’s the unspoken implication when Jane asks her would-be suitors why she would ever leave Tarzan for any other man. And in the sun of Tarzan’s protective adoration, O’Sullivan’s Jane blooms from a somewhat precious Mayfair girl to one who retains her good manners while becoming adventurous—even sexually adventurous.
That abandon is present all throughout Tarzan and His Mate (rousingly directed by Cedric Gibbons). The first two movies benefited from being made before the censorious Production Code took effect in 1934, and few Hollywood movies before or since have transmitted such a feeling of lovers at play.
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