Bill Hillman's

Issue 615
Presents
An ERBzin-e of the Silver Screen Compendium

TARZAN AND HIS MATE
Part II
Credits ~ Cast ~ Posters ~ Stills ~ Trivia

CAST:
Johnny Weissmuller ~ Tarzan
Maureen O'Sullivan ~ Jane Parker
Neil Hamilton ~ Harry Holt
Paul Cavanagh ~ Martin Arlington
 Forrester Harvey ~ Beamish
Nathan Curry ~ Saidi
Ray Corrigan ~ Double for Weissmuller
Paul Porcasi ~ Monsieur Gironde
Desmond Roberts ~ Van Ness
William Stack ~ Pierce
Yola d'Avril ~ Mme. Feronde
Runtime: USA:105 ~  Black and White  ~  Mono
Plot Summary:
In the first sequel to Tarzan, the Ape Man, Harry Holt returns to Africa to head up a large ivory expedition. This time he brings his womanizing friend Marlin Arlington. Holt also harbors ideas about convincing Jane to return to London. When Holt and Arlington show Jane some of the modern clothes and perfumes they brought from civilization, she is impressed but not enough to return. Tarzan wrestles every wild animal imaginable to protect Jane but when he disallows the expedition from plundering ivory from the elephant burial grounds, it is he who takes a bullet from Arlington's gun. Jane eventually believes that Tarzan is dead but he is nursed back to health by the apes. As Jane and the returning expedition are attacked by violent natives, we wonder if Tarzan can rescue them yet again.

• The movie was originally budgeted for location shooting in Africa and a spectacular jungle fire. Both plans were discarded.
• ERB was paid $45,000 for the film with option for two more films. He wanted to see a new Tarzan feature released every year. The final cost of the film was $1,279,142.
• Director Cedric Gibbons began filming on August 2, 1933, but he was soon replaced by Jack Conway who directed most of the films footage. Shooting concluded in March 1934.
• After being replaced by Conway, Gibbons returned to art direction and designed most of the sets used in the Tarzan series. He never directed another film.
• Cedric Gibbons went on to design the famous Oscar statuette for the Academy Awards. He personally won eleven Oscars for his work as a production designer.
• According to Jerry Schneider's Movie Making Locations website, the film was shot at: Big Tujunga, China Flats, Lake Sherwood/Sherwood Forest, MGM backlot, and Pico Rivera
• Maureen O’Sullivan was absent for over a month recovering from an appendectomy.
• Members of the Codonas and Picchiani acrobatic troupes in gorilla suits doubled for tree-swinging apes.
• Former Olympic swimmer, Josephine McKim doubled for Maureen O'Sullivan in the swim scenes - including the near-nude underwater scene.
• Thanks to the Hays censorship office, the brief costumes worn by the stars in this film were replaced by much  less revealing outfits in the Tarzan films that followed.
• Betty Roth, wife of lion owner Louis Roth, doubled for O'Sullivan in the close contact scenes with the lions.
• In the scene where dummy natives fell out of the trees to be eaten by lions, the lions actually were chewing meat attached to stakes driven into the ground.
• The lions Margie and Pasha owned by Bert Nelson were used in many featured lion scenes.
• Chimps Yama and Jiggs played Cheta.
• The rhino, Mary, was imported from Germany by trainer George Emerson who did most of the riding. Most of Weissmuller's riding shots were on a dummy.
• The many action sequences with animals were achieve through a combination of using trained animals, travelling matte shots, dummies and minatures.
• Most of the elephants in the film were of the Indian variety with pasted on ears to make them appear to African.
• The melody “My Tender One,” (written by Dr. William Axt for the film Eskimo)  was used in this, and the next three films.
• The film was a huge worldwide success but was banned in Germany by Hitler's Nazi party.
• English actor, Paul Cavanagh, who played  Martin, returned to work with Johnny Weissmuller as Commissioner Morrison in the Jungle Jim TV series.
• The ending in the Whitman Big Little Book version of Tarzan and His Mate is quite different from that of the film. In the book,  Holt dies taking a spear meant for Jane, and Martin is killed by an elephant as he tries to shoot Tarzan.
• The film's more erotic scenes were removed by order of film censors. Most of these missing scenes have recently been restored for modern releases.
• After seeing the film's famous underwater nude scene in August 1933, ERB wrote to son Hulbert: "It is a very beautiful and artistic shot. Their movements under water are naturally slow and extremely graceful. I saw nothing objectionable in it . . . it may get by the censors and it may not."

Around the time that Tarzan and His Mate was released, Jimmy Durante played Schnarzan, a spoof of the Tarzan character, in MGM's Hollywood Party. Coincidentally the female star of the movie was Lupe Velez, future wife of Johnny Weissmuller.

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REVIEWS: Fans

Maureen O'Sullivan turns in a stunning performance as "Jane", Tarzan's love interest. O'Sullivan's Jane set a new standard for female lead characters - strong, independent,  intelligent, and not afraid to accept new challenges and face new dangers. This is remarkable given that, at the time the film was made, the typical American view was that a woman's place was in the kitchen, yet here we see an attractive, diminutive, well-bred Englishwoman living in the jungle under harsh conditions and loving every minute of it. Several times during the film, a band of explorers try to convince Jane to return to civilization and conform to society's standards, and part of the film's plot revolves around her decision as to whether or not she should leave Tarzan and the jungle life and return to America, which has led some to draw parallels between women deciding between the workplace (a man's world at the time) and the home (a woman's world at the time) and the film's world of the jungle and then-modern society.

Johnny Weismuller is cast perfectly for this role. The fact that he's an Olympic swimmer lends credibility to his role as a muscular he-man living with the apes. While some people have criticized his lack of acting ability (confusing his limited lines to be equivalent with limited acting ability), I've come to the conclusion that he's a natural actor - one who can express a range of emotion with very few words - which is exactly what Tarzan should be. As an athlete, Weismuller is used to expressing himself physically - Weismuller's Tarzan is a man of few words and limited grammar, but his eyes and body language express exactly what he's feeling and thinking. While Jane is the speaker who does, Tarzan is the doer who speaks. Jane is the civilized communicator who is not afraid to dive into a crocodile-infested river. Tarzan is the noble savage who dives into a river and only speaks to clarify what his eyes and hands are saying.

The plot is basically this: a band of explorers venture into the jungle to search for the legendary elephant graveyard to find their fortune in ivory elephant tusks. They meet Jane and befriend her, hoping that she and Tarzan will help them in their search. She convinces Tarzan to guide the hunters, although Tarzan does not feel comfortable with the venture, believing that the hunters should not be violating the sanctity of the animals' graveyards (and the unspoken law of the jungle). Indeed, at one point the hunters wound an innocent animal to track it to a grave. Tarzan decides that the hunters are evil and leaves their safari, though Jane continues on as the hunters provide her with a taste of the civilized life she left behind.

We see the conflict in Tarzan between his love for Jane and his love for the animals. We see the conflict in Jane between her love of Tarzan and her memories of civilization. The decisions that the two must make as the movie progresses have been interpreted by some as having hidden meanings and that the film producers were using the Tarzan vehicle to make statements about modern society. But I'll let you watch the film yourself and make your own decisions.

One last thing: this is the only film in the series (other than the "Tarzan" film made by John Derek and starring Bo Derek) in which Jane wears a two-piece leather costume. It's also the only installment (other than the "Tarzan" film by the Dereks) in which Jane becomes nude (but in a non-sexual scene). Trying to persuade Jane to return to civilization, the hunters give Jane a formal evening gown, which she wears to dinner and all through the night. The next morning, as she climbs out of bed still wearing it, Tarzan picks her up and carries her out onto a tree limb over the river. He dumps her into the water while holding onto the dress, so that she falls into the river naked. Tarzan makes no long soliloquy here - he's just expressed his opinion on the whole matter of civilized society quite succinctly.User Rating:  7.1/10 (172 votes) 

There is a lot of near-nudity in this jungle adventure nonsense of 1934, one of the last mainstream films to peddle flesh openly before The Code began to bite. Jane's nude swim was edited out as a post-production afterthought, but her jungle garb leaves little to the imagination in any event. With regard to the story, there isn't much to analyse. Two white hunters, one good and one bad, go on safari to the elephants' graveyard. Martin (bad) wants to help himself to the ivory that's lying around, and Harry (good) carries a torch for Jane, whom he knew in her London society days. He hopes to woo her away from the Ape Man. The film has much to its credit. If the narrative is fairly flimsy, it is related with gusto, and both sound and images are beautifully clear. The scenery, especially that of the Mutiyah Escarpment, is marvellous. Both Weissmuller and O'Sullivan are amiable and photogenic screen presences.

On the other hand, there is plenty about this effort that is simply preposterous.Let's begin with the animals. Zebras live on plains, in herds. To have one solitary zebra meandering through the jungle is plain silly. The apes are oh-so-obviously guys in gorilla suits. Tarzan's penchant for fighting lions by hand is barmy, and not very persuasively filmed. As for taking on the rhino ... well, the back projection is so obvious that the scene is marginally less frightening than a Liberace TV special. The rhino's attack on Cheetah's mother is unintentionally hilarious, with the man in the monkey suit doing a neat somersault when butted. The rhino itself must be all of three months old. African elephants are everywhere - except that  they are actually docile little Indian elephants with big paper ears glued on.

Now for the humans. How come Tarzan lives in the wild, but is always clean-shaven? How does the guy with the five-word vocabulary understand everything that's said to him? One of the native bearers is shot dead for having the impudent nerve to be tired and scared. This murder is condemned, not because it is barbaric, but because everyone else will now have more stuff to carry. The character of Harry is fairly central to the film, but the script forgets to tell us what happened to him.

The vine-swinging is truly awful. Totally studio-bound and entrusted to trapeze artists, it looks exactly what it is - a circus act filmed indoors. Tarzan is made to appear athletic as he climbs up to build a tree-house, by the rather crude expedient of having him climb down, then reversing the motion. Still, audiences were naive in 1934 ... and Jane looks good.

"Tarzan and His Mate" is an early Tarzan picture that is an improvement over later films in the series, but still lacks the quality to pass for anything above escapist entertainment.

The plot has white elephant hunters using Tarzan to locate and plunder a huge elephant graveyard of ivory tusks. The hunters encounter resistance from enemy African tribes and organized animal armies. Jane tries to help the hunters, one of them a discarded beau. She gets into frequent trouble and often requires rescue from Tarzan.

The film starts slowly, with our two safari-clad hunters talking to various uninteresting white people that we never see again. The expedition finally begins for the ivory. An enormous number of Africans are hired for labor, and are cruelly used, even shot, by the reckless expedition head. There is a disorganized battle with an opposing tribe, and an unlikely confrontation with rock throwing apes. At long last we meet Tarzan, as he prevents the apes from further killing off unlucky Africans.

Tarzan rules the apes and the elephants. Heaven knows how he has trained him, but they obey without question. He has no power over "bad" animals, such as lions, rhinos and crocodiles. When he makes the mistake of leaving Jane's side, she ends up trapped by these bad creatures, but Tarzan comes to the rescue when called. The lion and rhino fights are good stunts, but the crocodile is an obvious spinning dummy. These scenes are similar to those from "King Kong" (1933) which had the big ape battling various dinosaurs to impress Fay Wray.

The wild finale involves an army of lions who for no apparent reason are after the hunters, and even attack an opposing army of elephants. Tarzan is the improbable victor of a series of one-on-one battles with enormous lions.

It is refreshing to see Jane with more sensuality than clothes, and a sense of adventure sparks the movie. The sets are impressive as well. However, muddled direction and plot keep the film from being more than watchable. (43/100)

The New York Times Review

Having apparently dwelt in the jungle since they first met in "Tarzan, the Ape Man," Johnny Weissmuller, the swimming ace, and the comely Irish colleen, Maureen O'Sullivan, are now to be seen at the Capitol in a sequel to their first adventure. The current offering, which is hailed as " Tarzan and His Mate," is, if anything, even more fantastic than its predecessor. One gathers that the first year of Tarzan and Jane Parker (Miss O'Sullivan) in the African wilds has been a happy one, that they have made many friends among apes and elephants and that they have dozens of arboreal abodes.

Harry Holt and Martin Arlington are companions on an expedition. Holt hopes to win back his sweetheart, Jane, but Arlington's only wish is to bring back plenty of ivory. It seems to be no more difficult to find Tarzan and Jane than it is to locate Times Square in Manhattan. Jane's wardrobe is limited and the very thoughtful Holt has brought with him trunks filled with many gowns and frocks, some of which are not precisely suited to leaping from tree to tree as Tarzan and his mate do. Perfume and various other gifts to appeal to the feminine taste are brought by the love-lorn Holt.

Tarzan does not think much of the perfume and even less of a silk gown. He is a man of the forest, an emperor, so to speak, of the jungle, who likes to get his breakfast by diving into a pool and bringing forth a fish. Coffee has a peculiarly distasteful flavor to him. He does, however, cherish his hunting knife, for with it he has laid low many jungle outlaws, such as lions, tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and so forth.

It does not even take Tarzan's breath away to have a set-to in the water with a crocodile, and Jane expects him to emerge from the fray victorious, as he does at all times. Here he rides astride rhinoceros and has encounters with a variety of animals. It is all in a day's work! He even expects Jane to be as agile as he is, seeing to it that she does her daily dozen, in the shape of springing from branch to branch and taking headers into lakes. Tarzan is no easy person to please. He speaks only an occasional word, and even then he gets mixed up, which is apt to make one conclude that there must be days that pall upon Jane. Yet she prefers the jungle to Mayfair.

They yowl to each other and cover distance far quicker via the tress than they could on the ground. In case there should not be enough excitement furnished by jungle fauna and the villainous Arlington, who, be it known, would do anything for a couple of hundred ivory tusks, there is a host of savages, evidently of two different tribes. These natives are quite expert with their spears and arrows.

Aside from the wild tale, this film is a marvel from a photographic standpoint. Tarzan has his hand to hand encounters with leopards, hippopotamuses and other beasts, and Jane has anything but a merry time with several lions. Some of them are evidently riddled with bullets, but just when one may think that the beasts' teeth have been extracted and that their mouths are wired, one perceives Tarzan's arm in a lion's jaw equipped with splendid white teeth. In another instance one perceives an elephant limping along and finally lying down to die in a spot known as "the elephants' burial ground." This provoked from a young lass: "Oh, the poor lamb!" Just got her animals mixed, but her sympathy was sincere.

Needless to say that Miss O'Sullivan and Mr. Weissmuller acquit themselves in the same favorable fashion they did in their former hectic experiences.

Tarzan and His Mate contains no implication that Tarzan and Jane Parker have been married. They are living together in natural frivolity, ignoring the precepts of Tsar Hays and obeying no civilized conventions except, perhaps, those of birth control.

A wild, disgraceful, highly entertaining orgy of comic, sensual and sadistic nonsense, Tarzan and His Mate was brilliantly directed by Cedric Gibbons, and acted with vigor by Weissmuller and O'Sullivan.

It may be silly, but it continues to be fascinating, this "Tarzan" theme. In Tarzan and His Mate, second of the Metro series with Johnny Weissmuller, the monkeys do everything but bake cakes and the very human elephants always seem on the verge of sitting down for a nice quiet game of chess; yet the picture has a strange sort of power that overcomes the total lack of logic and (probably most important) it is an extraordinarily beautiful photographic specimen. The picture will doubtless draw business.

Tarzan No. 1 ended with Tarz and the white girl from England at peace in their jungle kingdom. They're again at peace as No. 2 ends, but in the 92 minutes between the two fade-outs they're almost in pieces, several times. Trouble starts soon as the domain of Mr. and Mrs. Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan) is trespassed upon by Neil Hamilton and Paul Cavanagh, a couple of Miss O'Sullivan's heels from Mayfair. The boys after the fortune in ivory which lies in a pachyderm graveyard.

 There are gory battles between bands of natives to liven up the proceedings when Tarzan isn't fighting some jungle beast that is just about to devour his mate. Tarz's stiffest encounters are with a horned rhinoceros and a giant alligator, respectively. His encounter with the rhino is obviously phoney and seemingly impossible, but so well done that it provides a real thrill. The underwater battle with the 'gator supplies a big kick also. Tarz's hand-to-paw grappling with lions are, in comparison, just child's play even when one lion is close-upped with Tarzan's arm in his kisser, and the long teeth showing. Miraculously, when the arm is withdrawn it bears nary a scratch. But such slight discrepancies are easily overlooked, since it's granted that Tarz is a cinch bet in all matches, despite that he always gives away at least two or three tons in weight.

But for a white man's bullet, Tarz is just another sucker. He is temporarily felled by a slug tossed at him by Cavanagh, who at first can't make up his mind whether he wants the ivory or Mrs. Tarzan, and then decides he wants both. In this animal picture, Cavanagh represents the species skunk.

Apes of both the genuine and prop variety play a large part in the picture. One of the real ones, called Cheta, does messenger service for Tarz whenever the missus is in danger, such as the identical pair of lions that a few moments before had made a meal of Cavanagh and Hamilton.

Tarzan and his mate spend most of their time swinging through the branches. Film goes so far as to stage a regulation flying act, with Tarz tossing Mrs. Tarz into an aerial loop, to be caught by the outstretched arms of an ape. The Tarzans also do some fancy swimming, particularly during a tank sequence when Weissmuller and a lady swimmer doubling for Miss O'Sullivan, perform some artistic submarine formations. The lady is brassiereless but photographed from the side only. Weissmuller duplicates his first Tarzan performance, which means the girls will probably go strong for him again. Miss O'Sullivan, never wearing much in the way of clothes, isn't bad to look at from the masculine viewpoint.

The Culver City jungle and studio exteriors were so constructed as to look like the real thing. In every technical department, the picture is first grade.

. WEBJED: BILL HILLMAN .
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