The second and best of the MGM Johnny Weismuller vine-swingers, infamous for its pre-Code nudity and blood splatter. Perhaps no other movie from this era can match its body count. This film stacks ’em high when a doomed party of ivory profiteers and African grunt workers search for an elephant graveyard and get slaughtered along the way by either a spear-wielding cannibal tribe or a rock-throwing gorilla. As for the steamy stuff, Tarzan and Jane are past the courting stage from the first movie and it’s obvious that Tarzan’s been poking her with his own spear ten times a day ever since. This film’s discretion about it is as skimpy as Maureen O’Sullivan’s two-piece outfit. It’s one of the sexiest relationships in American movies of the time.
The only person in denial about it is Jane’s poor jilted lover (Neil Hamilton, future Commissioner Gordon in the Batman TV series thirty years later) understandably still confused as to how he lost his aristocrat girl to an illiterate who sleeps in a tree and talks to apes all day. This sad sack continues to try to coax her back to cozy England. When she tries on a slinky dress that he brings to her, it looks like he ALMOST has a shot. When that same dress later gets torn off her body by a convenient tree branch during an afternoon frolic and Jane’s reaction is to take a blissful nude swim with Tarzan, you know the ex doesn’t stand a chance. Yep, Jane’s naked ass here has actual thematic purpose! It’s not 100% gratuitous (let’s call it 50% gratuitous). The scene clarifies Jane’s rejection of civilization in favor of jungle living with her new man. Later versions that chopped out all the scandalous skin in order to comply with the wet blanket Hay’s Code aren’t as good (the restored cut is all that’s available today, Hallelujah).
Let’s not make this sound too respectable, though. This is PULP, bless it’s thumping heart. Some of the best representation of it in movies of the time. It delivers the kind of thrills, spills, sex and brutal violence that the mothers of 1934 might not have wanted to their kids to see. It holds up today, as long you can overlook some expected racial ickiness and no music score.