Summary
Olympic champion swimmer whose twelve Tarzan films (1932–1948) made him, in Said’s “Jungle Calling”, the only Tarzan: a monosyllabic, mysterious figure of pure existence whose performances are read as better and more uncompromising than Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novelistic original, and whose Tarzan is finally an immigrant in permanent Exile (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.315-322). The name is spelled once as “Weismuller” at PDF p.320, as printed (see the source page’s Open questions).
Details
- In the twelve films he made between 1932 and 1948 his Tarzan’s speech was minimal (“Tarzan-Jane”); Gabe Essoe’s Tarzan of the Movies tells how, supposed to point and say “You go”, he said “You go quick” and was cut for loading the scene with a long speech (PDF p.315).
- No one was Tarzan for as long, and the later comic-book, television and movie Tarzans (Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, Ron Ely, Jock Mahoney) are trite variations on his routines — grunts, tree swinging, Methodist-like rectitude and all; his apeman was a genuinely mythic figure, a pure Hollywood product built partly out of elements nowhere in Burroughs, such as Tarzan’s phenomenal swimming powers (PDF p.315-316).
- Of his several Janes only Maureen O’Sullivan really counted; their loincloth costumes grew from tiny fig leaves to grotesquely large dowager beach costumes as the tree house grew more elaborate — the embourgeoisement of the Tarzan family — and the “found” son Boy (Johnny Sheffield) left after ten years, having grown too large (PDF p.316).
- An Olympic champion many times over, he was considered the greatest swimmer in the first half of the twentieth century; not muscle-bound, his swimmer’s physique blended with the general mystery of his Tarzan’s origins, of which the films tell nothing (PDF p.318).
- In the twelve films he pronounced only one non-English word, “umgawa”, an order to animals, an expostulation to Cheetah the chimpanzee, and less frequently a shout at the blacks who people the series (PDF p.319).
- His Tarzan suspects visiting whites on sight, destroys their cameras and guns and refuses to help capture wild animals even for science, while not actively provoking even the most menacing of his black antagonists — the jungle inhabitant who accepts the system and opposes intruders because they destroy the finely tuned ecological zero state he defends (PDF p.319-320).
- Seen in the late 1940s and early 1950s as Jungle Jim — older, chubbier, fully clothed and actually speaking — he had already happened and was over; his later life was a parody of his jungle life: four of his five marriages ended in divorce, his money was squandered, and he was plagued by the IRS; he worked at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, moved to Fort Lauderdale as honorary curator of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, was left an invalid by strokes in the 1970s, and died in 1984 in Acapulco, near where his last Tarzan movie, Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948), was filmed (PDF p.321-322).
Related pages
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Frantz Fanon, Exile, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays