Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan share one of their happier moments in the surprisingly grim TARZAN ESCAPES.
presented here in all its graphic glory. Among the restored bits: an early splatter effect, as a cursed Gaboni is stabbed in the neck and blood gushes forth (if you still-step through this, you can see the blade retract); the aforementioned nude sil- houette as Jane changes clothes; and, most im- portantly, Jane’s nude swim with Tarzan, her body (O’Sullivan’s double) fully and clearly visible by the underwater camera for a surprisingly long stretch. This was an expansion on an idea from BIRD OF PARADISE (1932), in which director Gib- bons’ wife Dolores Del Rio performed a similar semi-nude underwater ballet. Nudity aside, the very nature of Tarzan and
Jane’s relationship flew in the face of Hollywood’s increasingly conservative moral standard. Married couples in concurrent films were consigned to twin beds and separated by a Code-designated mea- surement, while Tarzan and Jane not only par- took in an obvious sexual relationship outside of wedlock, but also clearly shared a bed... well, a nest. On top of all that, in the case of TARZAN AND HIS MATE, it is more than suggested that Jane sleeps in the nude. Perhaps MGM was start- ing to feel the heat from the Hays Board prior to
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shooting, for in this film’s “bedroom” scene, Tarzan wakes Jane with an “I love you”; and O’Sullivan, as if anticipating the censors’ protests, prompts him to add, “... my wife.” Trivia nuts should note that we hear Jane’s
funny soprano variation on the Tarzan yodel for the first time in TARZAN AND HIS MATE, as well as “Ungawa,” the most popular word in Tarzan’s weird, unexplained vocabulary (how is it that na- tives and animals understand it?). It started out as a command for animals to “Go” but in time was used so liberally by Weissmuller that it could have meant anything. The word seems to have evolved out of several tentative precedents from the previous film, such as “Ogoona,” “Ogoowa,” and one certain to jolt a few cult movie fans— “Eegah!” It has been supposed that TARZAN ESCAPES
(1936) could have been the best of all the MGM Tarzan pictures. However, when original pro- ducer Phil Goldstein delivered his first cut, the studio brass were so dismayed over the exces- sive violence that they hired a new producer and director—Sam Zimbalist and Richard Thorpe, re- spectively—to rewrite the script by John Farrow
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