TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Cedric Gibbons
Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O'Sullivan, Neil Hamilton,
Paul Cavanaugh, Forrester Harvey, Nathan Curry
Rival teams of ivory hunters set out in search of the legendary elephants' graveyard. There's a map, but only one man can get them there and back with the ivory: Tarzan. MGM's followup to "Tarzan the Ape Man", in which Tarzan swings through the treetops, fights lions, outswims crocodiles, frolics with free-spirited wife Jane, and calls on the apes and elephants whenever he needs to raise an army on short notice. It's one of the movies that moved Hollywood to start enforcing the Production Code, provoked by O'Sullivan's revealing jungle costume and a long-censored underwater swimming scene in which Jane appears nude. (It's Olympic swimming champion Josephine McKim, not O'Sullivan, doing the actual swimming.) It's dated, silly, sexist, racist, culturally insensitive and tough on wild animals, and while it's not exactly an excuse, that's the way they made them back then. Call it a guilty pleasure. And a great Tarzan movie.
