Johnny Weissmuller swings from vines, talks to elephants, stabs killer apes, and gets Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane hotter than the African sun in this iconic first film in MGM’s Tarzan series. It’s a solid adventure story, full of nasty pre-Code violence and some good chase scenes, hampered only by the complete absence of a music score (like many films of the early 1930s). More memorable than the action though is the remarkably sexy relationship between loincloth-clad Tarzan and porcelain English artistocrat Jane. The film never strongly suggests that they have any sex here, but you know it’s coming and you know it’s going to be wild. The next film in the series, Tarzan and His Mate, would play up the steamy stuff even more.
On the downside, this is among the more racist Hollywood films of the time. Watching movies from this period often means forgiving racist moments—the cheerfully obsequieus black maids and butlers, the Stepin Fetichits and the Sleep n’ Eats—but this film shoves it in your face so much that you almost can’t not react to it today. Even if you overlook the depiction of the Africans as personality-less grunt workers for our pack of snow white British explorers, the movie takes the racial ickiness several steps forward in the scene where charming old C. Aubrey Smith matter-of-factly describes the Africans as “barely human”. Let’s also mention the moment where an African tribesman, weighed down carrying a trunk on his back, slips off the edge of a narrow cliff and our intrepid explorers are instantly more disturbed by the loss of some of their supplies than the violent death that just happened right in front of them.
I’m no champion for political correctness, but yeesh, this film’s got some rough moments.