TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934) **1/2 A vivacious young British socialite has been living in sin with an apeman in the dark depths of Africa, for a year. Venture capitalists seek to woo her back with dresses and perfume and baubles. Well, any decent Mayfair or Bel Air detective can tell you how this one's going to turn out. At best, for the dull guys, the girl will take the gifts and leave them holding the credit card bag. And so it goes with Tarzan and Jane. As the title suggests, the studio is onto the fact that Jane is by far the more interesting character (after all, you can only do so much with a dull, white, monosyllabic, musclebound oaf with a heart of gold, and who commands wild animals), and presents her as that most intimidating character-the sexually liberated woman. So the film takes about 20 minutes reminding us why Africans trust, always will and probably should, despots like Robert Mugabe more than self-righteous pontificates like Tony Blair (Mugabe has been oppressing them for a mater of decades while Blair represents a system that enslaved them for centuries; Mugabe could turn good, or at least die and give way to someone better; Blair would lose his job if he tried to give them a fair shake), then turns its attention to sex and violence in the shadow of the Serengetti. It all looks like a lot of fun, no wonder so many women aren't satisfied listening to tales of office politics and entertaining the boss! Johnny Weissmuller, for example, beats up not only a rhinoceros, but also an alligator...before breakfast (but not before Maureen O'Sullivan has wiped a lock of hair from his eyes and wryly informed him that he's "a very bad boy")! The rhino fight is, in fact, the highlight of the entire film. Cedric Gibbons (who got all the credit) and/or Jack Conway (who did most of the work) run a seminar on primitive film technique that is nothing less than brilliant: Olympian swimmers ducking beneath lions doing flips over them while depicted on screens behind, chimpanzees superimposed and thereby riding upon the horns of rhinos, fast motion corkscrewing alligators trying to drill Tarzan like a narwhale on methamphetamine spun out of an enthusiastic and giant firecracker launcher, Tarzan and Jane clinging to each other as they swing through their trees, or astride elephants, no doubt on their way to have an even better time somewhere else...as I said, it's all very entertaining, and most everyone appears to be having a good time except for the venture capitalists. Which brings up an interesting point. Tarzan is interesting, Maureen is interesting, the animals are interesting, the African tribesmen are interesting (even though they are defined in their relation to white people: the servants are portrayed sympathetically, the resistance as evil and irrational), but...who is most responsible for making cinema what it is, for giving us this tremendous vantage point from which to assess the relativity of values? Was it not the venture capitalists? Are they not, then, some sort of benevolent martyrs, living lives in material cages that the rest of us might be enlightened at their expense? So go the dangers of sophistry....Rousseau knew it, Tarzan knew it; Edgar Rice Burroughs, who at one point attended Miss Coolie's Maplehurst School for Girls and later lived as a cowboy, must have known (though this film relates to him only through the use of its characters), Jane reclaimed it, we can do the same...do more and think less!
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