TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932) *1/2 The first, and worst, of the Tarzan flicks featuring the immortal pairing of Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O'Sullivan. There's virtually no explanation for why either of them are attracted to each other, or indeed why anyone would be attracted to either of them. He's more brooding and self-absorbed than the Tarzan we've come to know. She's way worse-she's the noisiest thing in an extremely noisy film. First she's going on and on in an awful, sugary socialite way. Then she's screaming about everything. Her first line of defense in assuring her father that Tarzan is "like us" is to note that "he's white." Finally she settles in on pseudo-philosophical lamentations of the sort caused by constipation, or psychological debris resulting from poorly attempted justifications of serial and inexplicably bad decisions. In addition to her, he wrestles a lion, a wild boar, and a mutated gorilla. In addition to him, she makes eyes at a very boring guy, and herself in a mirror. She encounters difficulty identifying Pygmies. It is quite clear that Tarzan is actually swinging from a series of trapeze, rather than hanging vines as is popularly believed.
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