I've never seen the 1932 TARZAN THE APE MAN until I caught it on Turner Classic Movies yesterday. I'd read the Burroughs novels as a kid, and had generally disdained Weissmuller's grunting, monsyllabic Tarzan, but back then it seemed like TV only ever played the later entries in the series, and I was generally only interested in when they showed lizard fights from ONE MILLION BC. When I finally caught TARZAN AND HIS MATE on AMC in the 1980s, I was pleasantly surprised by the lithe young Weissmuller, whose appeal I finally understood, and even more pleasantly surprised by Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane, who was tough and heroic and sexy and who was quite clearly making mad monkey love to Tarzan between nearly every scene. But AMC never showed the film's 1932 predecessor as part of its package, and I somehow missed it until now.

I'd always read that it was inferior to TARZAN AND HIS MATE. That's true; there's nothing to match the nude swimming scene or the alligator fight, and MATE makes far superior use of actual wild animals on the set (rather than just background footage from TRADER HORN), adding an actual tame hippo to the mechanical ones seen in APE MAN and even an apparently trained rhinoceros, plus the impressive fights with lions. There's nothing like that in APE MAN.

Still, the film has its own considerable virtues. Even more than in MATE, Weissmuller actually ACTS, displaying curiosity, innocence, lust, love, and impressive simian body language. And the film is definitely Jane's story, to a degree that surprised me. She's not as heroic as she would become in MATE (and is never as scantily clad), and at times she can be hysterical and irritating, but O'Sullivan is so radiantly sexy (something she definitely didn't pass along to her daughter) that one forgives her the character's less sympathetic moments.

And then there's the climax, which is why I'm posting it on this board rather than the general cinema one. I knew, from seeing the photo in FAMOUS MONSTERS as a kid, that it involved Jane and her father and her former suitor being lowered into a pit by vicious pygmies (played by creepy looking midgets in blackface), to face the rage (and in Jane's case, possibly lust) of a giant gorilla (by giant, I mean about seven feet tall; not Kong-sized, but still bigger than any other jungle movie ape I've ever seen), and I knew the gorilla suit looked pretty freaky, but finally seeing it, I was delighted by just how horrific the sequence is. I think the gorilla, with its height, long arms, and mouth full of crocodile-like teeth, is one of the great unsung monsters of the 1930s, a terrifying apparition that makes the familiar suits seen in films like MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE and THE APEMAN even less impressive than they already were. It's such a towering, ghastly looking thing, so different from most movie simians, that I wonder if it was even mean to be a regular gorilla, but rather some Yeti-like horror. Whatever it is, it gave me the willies even now, and would have terrified the crap out of me as a kid. Plus, Tarzan's means of dispatching it is also memorably gruesome.

TARZAN THE APE MAN and TARZAN AND HIS MATE may well be travesties of the character that Burroughs created, but despite my love for ERB, I have to concede that they're better movies than any of the ones that depicted Tarzan more faithfully; as good as TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT, TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE and TARZAN GOES TO INDIA and GREYSTOKE are, they can't match the delirious pulp excitement on display in the first two films of the MGM series, and there's a sizzling eroticism between the young Weissmuller and O'Sullivan that gives the films an extra kick.

I searched the web for a video clip of the gorilla pit sequence, but couldn't find one. Here's the still that was published in FAMOUS MONSTERS when I was a kid. What you can't tell from looking at it is that the gorilla's face is mobile; moments later, after tossing C. Aubrey Smith clean out of the pit, it clutches O'Sullivan to its chest and its jaws open wide, looking very much like it intends to bite her face clean off, a shot that would have had my childhood self definitely hiding my eyes.

Here's another still, less impressive, but depicting the gorilla-suit actor's impressive height and the extended arms. The sequence in the film is much more darkly lit and atmospheric.

Wow, I don't remember that scene in TARZAN THE APE MAN at all. And I saw the film on the big screen (albeit 30-odd years ago) and again on TV. I have to see it again. Is it possible that that scene was cut from circulating prints and only recently restored?

Its in the DVD to be sure and pretty outrageous.

Actually, the first part of the scene is on YouTube. It just isn't labeled with the film's title, possibly to avoid having it yanked. Here the dwarves (Jane's father explicitly says they're dwarves, not pygmies) use their strangling ropes to force the porters into the pit (of course, the black guys die first), to be crushed or torn asunder by the beast within. You don't get that close a look at the gorilla monster until Maureen O'Sullivan, C. Aubrey Smith and the guy who plays her suitor are forced in as well, but the clip ends before then.

Fed to the gorilla!

When Tarzan arrives for the rescue (just ahead of the herd of elephants who slaughter the dwarves with some impressive carnage, taking some spear fatalities themselves), the fight is deliriously savage (SPOILERS, obviously, in the next paragraph).

The gorilla (or whatever it is) seems to be poised to bite Jane's face off when Tarzan leaps into the bit. The monster drops her and they wrestle. Tarzan is tossed around a bit. He stabs the monster but it doesn't seem affected, and he's clearly getting the worst of it in the fight. He crouches over the prone Jane, blood on his face, as the gorilla-thing shambles forward with raised arms (the suit definitely has arm extensions built it, giving it an impressive reach). Desperately tossing his knife, he catches the mutant simian right in the eye, and there's a bloody closeup before it goes over backwards dead. He and the recovered second male lead crouch over Jane, to protect her from the spears and arrows of the dwarves, and then the elephants burst into the big hut, trampling dwarves before hoisting them out.

It's probably the most deliriously over-the-top bit of pulp grand guignol in any Tarzan movie, as worthy of Robert E. Howard as it is of Burroughs. And, just like the nude swimming and the oodles of implied boinking in TARZAN AND HIS MATE, proof the film was aimed at adults; any kids who saw it in the 30s must have been damn traumatized, even more so than by Karloff's first entrance in FRANKENSTEIN.

Brian, I can't imagine how it could have been cut out. The film's climax would make no sense without it. Obviously, neither the Denny Miller nor the Bo Derrick remakes made any attempt at recreating the scene.

Another point about the film's obviously aimed at adults nature that I forgot to mention earlier. When Jane first shows up at her father's outpost and he's shocked to discover that she's a grown woman, we get a pretty amazing scene of her changing clothes in front of him, something that would be unimaginable today.

I couldn't find a YouTube clip, but there's a a slideshow of screen caps in this guy's blog.

The film is very much the story of Jane and her sexual awakening (Tarzan isn't even given an origin), only with blood-curdling thrills, and by the standards of its time, it's just as brazenly attempting to capitalize on the lead actress's sexual appeal as the Bo Derrick version did (admittedly, it does it BETTER, with much more style, and with a lot of amazing pulp action thrown in, along with some pretty boring travelog stuff apparently designed to use up all the left over stock footage from TRADER HORN).

And when seen in those terms, making Tarzan barely able to speak English makes sense. Jane, who keeps up a pretty constant chatter throughout their scenes together, actually says that his inability to talk is part of his sexual appeal (she doesn't use the word "sexual", but it's clearly what she means). It should be remembered that Burroughs's Tarzan couldn't read and write English, but couldn't yet speak or understand it when he first met Jane (he also hadn't yet learned French from D'Arnot). The nearest the screenplay comes to actually using a scene from the novel TARZAN OF THE APES (which it's not based on; Burroughs had allegedly refused to license any of his plots to Hollywood at this point, just his character, and screenwriter Cyril Hume seems to have used the wildly successful TRADER HORN as a sort of template) is when Tarzan starts to rape Jane, then responds to her entreaties and his own better nature reasserting itself (if I recall the novel correctly, which of course doesn't put it in those terms, he considers it but may not make any actual motions to do so; here, he actually seems to start to force himself on her before stopping), retreating to outside of the tree (he's deposited her in what appears to be his "nest" in a hollow space inside it) and spending the night clutching his knife, which he's driven into a branch to keep himself from falling off.

Another difference from the films after TARZAN AND HIS MATE is the presence of his entire tribe of apes, who also appear in the sequel. The young ones are played by real chimps, but the adults are actors in what appear to be chimpanzee (not gorilla) suits (they're bigger than real chimps, but not that much bigger; a mature male chimp is a larger and more formidable animal than someone who's only seen the trainable juveniles might expect). After MATE, no film until GREYSTOKE would attempt to show Tarzan's adopted tribe.

The apes, btw, raise the question of how much time transpires between the two films. In TARZAN AND HIS MATE, which I saw first, the first Cheetah seen in the film is an adult, apparently female ape, played of course by an actor in a costume, who dies saving Jane from a rhino. The second Cheetah, apparently male, is her son, who is played by a real juvenile chimp.

Remembering that, I'd wondered if Cheetah would appear in APE MAN as a young chimp or an actor. If it had been the latter, one might even wonder at the nature of Tarzan's relationship with her! However, the Cheetah in APE MAN is the expected real juvenile chimp, whose gender is never specified, and who presumably grows up to be the man-sized female scene in MATE.