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A Colony of the Imagination: Vicarious Spectatorship in MGM's Early Tarzan Talkies

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509200500526778

1543-5326

Brady Earnhart,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Brady Earnhart received his MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa, and his doctorate in English from UVA. He currently teaches American Literature at the University of Mary Washington. Notes This sampling technique was to become more widespread over the mid-1930s: according to Dana Benelli, Variety increasingly reported “camera crews being dispatched to distant locales to ‘gather atmosphere’ for upcoming films” (14). One of these, Jim Pierce, would go on to marry the writer's daughter and co-star with her in an early ‘30s radio version of Tarzan (Essoe 56). Gabe Essoe's Tarzan of the Movies: A Pictorial History of More Than Fifty Years of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Legendary Hero Citation(1968) provides illustrated descriptions of all major Tarzan movies from 1917 through 1968. Of the many readily available sources of information on the MGM series in particular, I have found most useful Rudy Behlmer's two-part American Cinematographer article “Tarzan: Hollywood's Greatest Jungle Hero” Citation(1987) and the interview with Behlmer and Scott Tracy Griffin included as an extra in the boxed DVD set Citation The Tarzan Collection (2004). This is a dynamic present in any number of other movies as well: as a metaphor for the imaginative space to which movies transport the viewer, Tarzan territory is especially close to that other 1930s MGM protectorate, Oz; in the terms of this comparison, we might see in Jane a Dorothy who never goes back to Kansas. We might also consider Cecilia, the character played by Maureen O’Sullivan's daughter Mia Farrow in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), a literalization of Jane's role as a stand-in for the viewer, though instead of rising into the screen Cecilia charms a fictional character down into the real world. “I can't make it out. How did he get here?” Jane's father asks. “Oh, it doesn't matter,” Jane answers. “He's happy…” The MGM hero's indifference to his origins has led many commentators to describe him as the most American Tarzan. Twenty-year-old Irish newcomer Maureen O’Sullivan. James Parker was played by C. Aubrey Smith, fresh from a similar but much smaller part in Trader Horn. Neil Hamilton, a former shirt model. He is best known today for the role of Police Commissioner Gordon in the late ‘60s TV series Batman. An element lifted from the original Trader Horn story. Johnny Weissmuller was already somewhat famous as a swimmer, having won five Olympic gold medals and broken an unprecedented number of world's records. He was under contract as a BVD underwear model when Hume spotted him in a hotel pool and invited him to meet producer Bernie Hyman. At the interview, by Essoe's account, Weissmuller was “unexpectedly stripped to his shorts and offered the part without even a screen test.” He was released from the modeling contract only when MGM agreed to let BVD photograph all the studio's top stars in BVD swimming suits (68–70). Warner Video has recently re-released all six together as a boxed set of DVDs. For more on the meaning of “Africa” as it was propounded to twentieth-century movie audiences, see Kenneth M. Cameron's thorough and highly readable Citation Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White (1994). E.g., “Giraffes, having no vocal chords, cannot utter a sound. They’re just naturally dumb, but not quite as dumb as the yokel who first saw one in a circus and said, ‘There ain't no such animule!’“ A kind of exploitation sometimes linked with National Geographic magazine. It backfires in Elizabeth Bishop's poem “In the Waiting Room” when a shy young girl reading a 1918 Osa and Martin Johnson article sees a picture of African women with “horrifying” breasts (4). Tarzan's elephants are played by stand-ins: Indian elephants (they’re easier to tame) sporting huge prosthetic ears and tusk extensions in order to pass as African, though it's odd that MGM took the trouble, considering how few people would have noticed. A more disturbing variation of this racist trope is the telephone conversation (“You ain't gettin’ fresh wid me is you, colored boy?”) between Cheeta the chimp and a black janitor in Tarzan's New York Adventure. Though Van Dyke may have contributed some actual African words from his recollections of the Trader Horn expedition, St. Andrews reports, “later expressions like ‘wakashinda nippa doo’ and ‘oona toona beebee’ were sheer inventions, and both Sheffield and Weissmuller carried them with them to the RKO Tarzan films” (〈http://www.mergetel.com/~geostan/mgm.html〉). In the same year, Disney put out its own notoriously racist parody: Trader Mickey. Widely considered the best of the Tarzan movies, it is also the most self-consciously a sequel: “Miss Jane–she stood right in front of that mirror putting cold cream on her face. Right where you’re standing now” etc. Tarzan's New York Adventure is something of an exception to this rule, though its comedy depends on our understanding that Tarzan could never really become a New Yorker. To the chagrin of O’Sullivan, who had been trying for years to have done with the role (Behlmer, II 38). Rear-screen shots of both Africa and Hollywood sets will recur throughout the series, usually either to render narrow escapes or to fill in background. The market scene in particular will echo near the beginning of Tarzan and His Mate when Martin Arlington takes a bath with rear-screen warriors dancing improbably outside his window, “Fresh from the Folies Bergère.” Jane's entry into the land of spectatorship finds a close parallel in that of her adoptive child in Tarzan Finds a Son. The film opens with Trader Horn footage of animals, quickly shifting to a view of a married couple looking out the window of a plane. The woman holds her baby up to the window and says, “Look dear! Oh, poor darling hasn't even learned to use his precious eyes.” O’Sullivan would evoke a very similar ambivalence as she reminisced, years later, about the movies’ first, wild popularity: “I was offered all kinds of places where I could go in my shame to hide from the cruel public ready to throw stones at me. It's funny. We were unreal people, and yet we were real” (Times Herald-Record, 1998, qtd. in Henderson 104). For an interesting look at gender constructs in Tarzan, see Barbara Creed's “Me Jane: You Tarzan!: A Case of Mistaken Identity in Paradise.” Though this is technically a misquote, and (as Creed points out) something of a sexist one: once he gets the point, the phrase Tarzan actually repeats is “Jane–Tarzan.”