The Crack of Dawn

Volume #257

2/24/23

Newsletter #257

The Crack of Dawn

I loved Tarzan movies when I was a kid.  They showed old Tarzan movies on TV every weekend, and they were still releasing new Tarzan movies to the theaters with some regularity.  I remember the first Tarzan movie I saw in the theater when I was six or seven, Tarzan Goes to India (1962) with Jock Mahoney, directed by John Guillermin (stalwart British B-director, who would have his moment in the sun a decade later with Towering Inferno [1975]).  I liked Jock Mahoney as Tarzan; he was 6’4”, handsome, athletic, and had a sense of humor.  I only found out later that he started his career as an actor in 1947 under his real name, Jacques O’Mahoney, in several Three Stooges shorts.

However, like most people, I considered Johnny Weissmuller to be Tarzan.  And the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films of the 1930s were the best.  This was where I developed my first my first crush on a movie actress – Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.  I actually cut out a photo of Maureen O’Sullivan in a low angle climbing a tree in her exceptionally skimpy outfit from Life magazine that clearly showed her tush and kept it in my wallet.  This shot was taken from the best of all the Tarzan movies, no question, Tarzan and His Mate (1934).

The first movie Tarzan was Elmo Lincoln (real name, Otto Elmo Linkenhelter), in Tarzan of the Apes (1918).  Lincoln was a sturdy, broad-chested actor who had just proven himself a stand-out in three D.W. Griffith pictures, including Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).  The 1918 movie was a big hit and they made two silent sequels.

Between 1912 when Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the first Tarzan book (of twenty-four), Tarzan of the Apes; and 1918, when they made the first movie, Tarzan became a worldwide phenomenon.  Burroughs started a company that did nothing but license the rights of Tarzan to comic strips, comic books, toys and everything else. Tarzan was the beginning of the licensing phenomenon that continues today. 

By the time sound arrived in the movies in 1928-29, Burroughs knew he was sitting on a gold mine, but he also wanted his character treated with respect and given the best possible presentation.  Therefore, Burroughs made a deal with biggest studio in Hollywood, MGM, to make top-notch, A-movies out of Tarzan.  Louis Mayer and his head of production, Irving Thalberg, took this very seriously and made several brilliant decisions.  The Olympics were to be held in Los Angeles in 1932.  The star of the previous two Olympics, 1924 in Paris and 1928 in Amsterdam, and winner of five gold medals, was American swimmer, Johnny Weissmuller (real name, Johann Peter Weißmüller, half-Jewish, and born in Romania).

Here were Mayer and Thalberg’s brilliant decisions: cast Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, cast their prettiest contract player, Maureen O’Sullivan, as Jane, and get W.S. Van Dyke to direct.  Woody Van Dyke — known as, “One-shot Woody” — had just gone to Africa and made the smash success, Trader Horn (1931), the first film shot on location in Africa.

So, instead of actually going to Africa for Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Woody Van Dyke cut in jungle footage from Trader Horn.  Tarzan the Ape Man came out during the 1932 Olympics, and surprise, it was a huge hit. 

This is the interesting part of the story as far as I’m concerned, and I don’t have Louis Mayer and Irving Thalberg’s reasons for doing what they did, but I find it wonderfully odd.

MGM upped the budget on the next Tarzan film, Tarzan and His Mate (1934), assigned one of their top directors, Jack Conway, who takes second billing to Hollywood’s most celebrated Art Director, Cedric Gibbons.  Cedric Gibbons is a Hollywood legend: winner of eleven Oscars, head of MGM’s art department for thirty-seven years, and the man co-directed one movie in his entire career, Tarzan and His Mate.  Why?  Released right before the Hayes Code came in, Gibbons and Conway keep getting shots of Maureen O’Sullivan as the insufficient bottom flap of her outfit keeps revealing her tush.  In one shot, if there were just a little more light, I swear you’d see pussy.  That was the shot I cut out of Life Magazine and kept in my wallet. For reference.

This film is the Tarzan story where the white hunters follow Tarzan to the elephant graveyard behind the waterfall, where all of the elephants have been going to die for years.  The film has several great wide shots of hundreds of elephant bones and tusks in miniature, a dying elephant’s little tusk going up and down.  It has all kinds of cool old effects.  Tarzan gets into a fight with a great ape on the side of a mountain and just sticks it with a knife and just throws it off the cliff.  He’s the King of the Apes and he doesn’t take shit.

But why did Cedric Gibbons only co-direct that one movie? 

Tarzan became a series of B-movies after that, with increasingly less effort and money put into them.  Then Maureen O’Sullivan left, then Johnny Weissmuller left.  But Tarzan kept going.  Buster Crabbe, Lex Barker, Herman Brix (AKA Bruce Bennett), Glen Morris, Gordon Scott, Denny Miller, Mike Henry, then cut to me at five or six years old watching Jock Mahoney dive out of a plane into a lake in India.  I also remember seeing the next Tarzan movie, Tarzan’s Three Challenges (1963), in the theater, Jock Mahoney’s other Tarzan movie – he only made two.  But since I was young, and those were the films I saw in the theater, to me Tarzan will always be Johnny Weissmuller and Jock Mahoney.  And as Jacques O’Mahoney, which is his real name, he’s funny as hell in the western Three Stooges short.

And with that, a new day dawns.