Watched these during Friday's Weissmullathon on TCM and was, as on previous viewings, impressed by the last half of APE-MAN and almost all of MATE. As a kid I'd never liked the Weismuller films because he's not the Lord Greystoke of the novels, but neither of the first two films in the MGM series ever seemed to run on local TV in the 60s (and, of course, MATE would have been censored), and if I could have seen them back then, I think I would have appreciated them much more than their successors.
Plus, they have virtues I wouldn't have appreciated back then. Sure, Weissmuller isn't the articulate Jungle Lord of the novels, but he's actually pretty compelling, brylcremed hair and all. In these two films he's lean and mean and sexy, with an impressive amount of catlike grace,and he plays really well off O'Sullivan, and never rarely seems like the beefy stiff he later becomes in the series. He's really alive on screen, at least in his scenes with her, and really, who wouldn't be? And O'Sullivan is great. In her other films, she usually strikes me as a bit stiff and repressed, but not so here -- she's fiery and uninhibited and sexy in way that suggests cinema's OTHER Maureen O -- in fact, in these two films, Ms.O'Sullivan may be even hotter than Ms. O'Hara, and that's a pretty tall order. Something in playing off each other really brought out the best in both of them.
APE-MAN isn't as good as MATE, being more padded with stock footage, but it's interesting to see how it's very much Jane's story, not Tarzan's, and even in this, the less risque of the two, she clearly has a one-night stand with Big T before deciding to rejoin her father's safari. And then there's that climax, with the chanting dwarves in blackface and that damn THING in the pit -- I expect it's supposed to be a gorilla, but it doesn't look like any other ape costume I've seen and is a really effective monster. Rather than crouching, the stuntman inside stands up straight, to emphasise the creature's extreme height, and this makes it seem more like some Yeti style creature than a proper ape. Plus, rather than just upper and lower canines, it has a double row of alligator teeth, rather like my old neighbor Tom Savini's "Fluffy" in CREEPSHOW. The scene with it would have terrified me when I was eight or nine years old, especially when it looks like it's going to bite Jane's face off, although by ten or eleven I would have been cheering, as it really does come off as the cinematic equivalent, not of a Burroughs scene, but of one of Conan's fights with a Man-Ape. It's one of the purest pieces of horror-pulp action I've seen in a film, and one of the few that was filmed contemporaneously with the literary variety. The first time I saw it, several years ago on TCM, I was shocked by the knife to its eye and even more shocked when Tarzan administered the coup de grace by slitting its throat.
Nothing in the even better TARZAN AND HIS MATE is quite that horrific, although the early shock-cut to bloody corpse with a spear its forehead and ants crawling on its face can make you gasp. But it has Action Jane, the cinematic prototype of the Jungle Heroine, wearing that revealing two-piece and generally being the sexiest woman in 30s cinema. Whereas in APE-MAN, Jane screams at the unexpected sight of a wildebeest, here she keeps a cool head during the spectacular lion attack, fighting back with a spear, building a fire, and when surrounded by the big cats, lying down and playing dead rather than fainting, and not screaming even when they paw at her and try to roll her over. Bravo, Jane! And some of the special effects are just astonishingly good -- the enormous crocodile that Tarzan fights is a pretty seamless blend of a a full-size mechanical prop and a miniature that's so flexible and sinuous it almost looks like stop-motion. I can't imagine what was involved in doing the shot where a lioness leaps onto an elephant's face, is shaken off and trampled to death -- a google search on frame captures shows that it IS a special effect, that they didn't actually force a lion to fight an elephant (far as I can tell, almost all the real animal violence is out-takes and back projection plates from TRADER HORN). It's also the only jungle film I've seen with both a (real) trained rhino and a (real) trained hippo.
TARZAN AND HIS MATE isn't just a great Tarzan movie, but a great action film, imho the equal of GUNGA DIN and FOUR FEATHERS and ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, and TARZAN THE APE-MAN has one of the most effective horror sequences (and best monsters) in thirties cinema.
Plus, they have virtues I wouldn't have appreciated back then. Sure, Weissmuller isn't the articulate Jungle Lord of the novels, but he's actually pretty compelling, brylcremed hair and all. In these two films he's lean and mean and sexy, with an impressive amount of catlike grace,and he plays really well off O'Sullivan, and never rarely seems like the beefy stiff he later becomes in the series. He's really alive on screen, at least in his scenes with her, and really, who wouldn't be? And O'Sullivan is great. In her other films, she usually strikes me as a bit stiff and repressed, but not so here -- she's fiery and uninhibited and sexy in way that suggests cinema's OTHER Maureen O -- in fact, in these two films, Ms.O'Sullivan may be even hotter than Ms. O'Hara, and that's a pretty tall order. Something in playing off each other really brought out the best in both of them.
APE-MAN isn't as good as MATE, being more padded with stock footage, but it's interesting to see how it's very much Jane's story, not Tarzan's, and even in this, the less risque of the two, she clearly has a one-night stand with Big T before deciding to rejoin her father's safari. And then there's that climax, with the chanting dwarves in blackface and that damn THING in the pit -- I expect it's supposed to be a gorilla, but it doesn't look like any other ape costume I've seen and is a really effective monster. Rather than crouching, the stuntman inside stands up straight, to emphasise the creature's extreme height, and this makes it seem more like some Yeti style creature than a proper ape. Plus, rather than just upper and lower canines, it has a double row of alligator teeth, rather like my old neighbor Tom Savini's "Fluffy" in CREEPSHOW. The scene with it would have terrified me when I was eight or nine years old, especially when it looks like it's going to bite Jane's face off, although by ten or eleven I would have been cheering, as it really does come off as the cinematic equivalent, not of a Burroughs scene, but of one of Conan's fights with a Man-Ape. It's one of the purest pieces of horror-pulp action I've seen in a film, and one of the few that was filmed contemporaneously with the literary variety. The first time I saw it, several years ago on TCM, I was shocked by the knife to its eye and even more shocked when Tarzan administered the coup de grace by slitting its throat.
Nothing in the even better TARZAN AND HIS MATE is quite that horrific, although the early shock-cut to bloody corpse with a spear its forehead and ants crawling on its face can make you gasp. But it has Action Jane, the cinematic prototype of the Jungle Heroine, wearing that revealing two-piece and generally being the sexiest woman in 30s cinema. Whereas in APE-MAN, Jane screams at the unexpected sight of a wildebeest, here she keeps a cool head during the spectacular lion attack, fighting back with a spear, building a fire, and when surrounded by the big cats, lying down and playing dead rather than fainting, and not screaming even when they paw at her and try to roll her over. Bravo, Jane! And some of the special effects are just astonishingly good -- the enormous crocodile that Tarzan fights is a pretty seamless blend of a a full-size mechanical prop and a miniature that's so flexible and sinuous it almost looks like stop-motion. I can't imagine what was involved in doing the shot where a lioness leaps onto an elephant's face, is shaken off and trampled to death -- a google search on frame captures shows that it IS a special effect, that they didn't actually force a lion to fight an elephant (far as I can tell, almost all the real animal violence is out-takes and back projection plates from TRADER HORN). It's also the only jungle film I've seen with both a (real) trained rhino and a (real) trained hippo.
TARZAN AND HIS MATE isn't just a great Tarzan movie, but a great action film, imho the equal of GUNGA DIN and FOUR FEATHERS and ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, and TARZAN THE APE-MAN has one of the most effective horror sequences (and best monsters) in thirties cinema.
