It has to be said - this is a very strange film. A proper young English lass is kidnapped by a white man who, for reasons never explained in this version, lives with the apes. She instantly falls in love with him and gives up everything to swing through the trees with him. Hardly the kind of thing America in the early thirties would have thought proper. Which makes this film quite subversive - and Johnny Weissmuller is practically naked! His beauty, particularly in body shape and skin tone, is special - but so too is the performance of Maureen O'Sullivan. With Weissmuller monosyllabic at best, it is left to O'Sullivan to convey most of the story - and she does it with great grace and charm - and quite a bit of sex!
All that aside, there is some remarkable animal footage - sometimes with the actors and at other times with obvious doubles. There is a band of marauding pygmies (basically dwarves in black make-up) that has to be seen to be believed! The hardest things to take in this film though are its racism (the whites whip their black servants, and, when O'Sullivan's dad says that Tarzan has no real human feelings, O'Sullivan explodes "But he's white"!), and the rather fake animals used in certain scenes - particularly the men in ape suits. There is also some really bad rear projection. But, if you can ignore all that, there is much to enjoy and Cheeta the chimp is very cute.
But it is in the silent action sequences that the film really flies. Too often it gets bogged down in static sound sequences - and there is the usual problem with early talkies of too little music. It makes me think what a great silent film this would have been. W.S. Van Dyke was a first-rate visual director with many impressive silent films like "The Pagan" and if we could now just sit back and watch this sexy action film without talking and sound effects, just a great music score, this film could well be considered a masterpiece. But then I guess we would never have heard Tarzan's famous cry.
All that aside, there is some remarkable animal footage - sometimes with the actors and at other times with obvious doubles. There is a band of marauding pygmies (basically dwarves in black make-up) that has to be seen to be believed! The hardest things to take in this film though are its racism (the whites whip their black servants, and, when O'Sullivan's dad says that Tarzan has no real human feelings, O'Sullivan explodes "But he's white"!), and the rather fake animals used in certain scenes - particularly the men in ape suits. There is also some really bad rear projection. But, if you can ignore all that, there is much to enjoy and Cheeta the chimp is very cute.
But it is in the silent action sequences that the film really flies. Too often it gets bogged down in static sound sequences - and there is the usual problem with early talkies of too little music. It makes me think what a great silent film this would have been. W.S. Van Dyke was a first-rate visual director with many impressive silent films like "The Pagan" and if we could now just sit back and watch this sexy action film without talking and sound effects, just a great music score, this film could well be considered a masterpiece. But then I guess we would never have heard Tarzan's famous cry.