Until I watched the Sam Katzman (Earth vs the Flying Saucers, The Giant Claw, Zombies of Mura Tau) production of The Killer Ape with Johnny Weissmuller I had never seen a Jungle Jim feature in my life. Weissmuller began making the Jungle Jim features in 1948, the same year he played in his last Tarzan movie for RKO, Tarzan and the Mermaids. TATM is the only Weissmuller Tarzan feature I have yet to watch over (I of course saw it repeatedly on Saturdays afternoons as a kid) but I have it and need to get around to that some night. Some stories seem to suggest Weissmuller switched contracts from RKO to Columbia because Columbia agreed to let him wear clothes for his Jungle Jim character. Weissmuller was no longer the lean young man he was in Tarzan the Apeman, and had not been for sometime. Basically the Jungle Jim character, based on the Alex Raymond comic strip of the time, is Tarzan with clothes. At least in the one episode I watched here, and I will see others if I can find them, Weissmuller still seems a little too monosyllabic and spacey to be considered a man of civilized culture. He walks around the jungle with a knife and holding the hand of his pet chimp Tamba. But instead of a loin-cloth he wears a safari hat and uniform. You could almost image that it is a middle aged Tarzan who was giving a job by the local game commission because he is too old and heavy to swing through trees anymore. I saw a site that ranks the Jungle Jim movies, and along with The Lost Tribe, The Killer Ape is one of only two on the list to receive a one star rating. I guess I would be one of the few people to consider myself lucky to have began my exploration of the series with this feature.

I have done about three Weissmuller Tarzan features here at the Café and I am a huge fan of the films and in particular the early ones with Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. I am not sure what the Jungle Jim series is all about yet. I do not know if he has a female partner or Boy type character but he does Tamba the chimpanzee who gets Jim out of many sticky situations as Cheetah ever did Tarzan. The story in The Killer Ape starts off with Jim and some of his park warden pals commenting on how strange the crocodiles have been behaving lately. Seems they have lost any will power and resistance and have become uncommonly docile. We are treated to some stock footage of “natives” beating crocs with sticks and paddles to confirm this. Jim is of course concerned about the wildlife’s health and welfare. We are made aware of this in the following scene where he pounces on a sluggish, land bound crocodile that startled Tamba and kills it with his hunting knife Tarzan style. Later a Mexican looking girl dressed in a South Pacific patterned skirt walks upon Tamba and throws a net over him and Jim runs to the rescue. In one of many attempts through out the film she tries to stab him but he subdues her by grabbing her wrist. Jim proves to Shari (Carol Thurston) and her tribe, the Wasulis, that Tamba is his pet by making him do a back flip. That’s is settled but Shari and her fiancée Ramada (Burt Wenland) still do not trust him very much. Shari’s brother Mahara (Paul Marion) seems to trust more when he warns them not to trap animals in The Canyon of the Ape which, according to local legend, is inhabited by a monstrous half man half ape creature with a really bad temper.

MORE OF JUNGLE JIM AND THE KILLER APE HERE >>

TARZAN AND THE AMAZONS

1945/ Director: Kurt Neumann/ Writers: Edgar Rice Burroughs (characters)/ John Jacoby (writer)

Cast: Johnny Weissmuller, Johnny Sheffield, Brenda Joyce, Henry Stephenson, Maria Ouspenskaya, Barton MacLane, Shirley O’Hara

Tarzan and the Amazons was Johnny Weissmuller’s ninth outing as Edgar Rice Burrough’s jungle lord and his youthful and Olympian physique of 1932’s Tarzan and the Apes have long disappeared, though he is still sturdy and imposing. Also gone is sexy Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. O’Sullivan quit her role as Jane and Tarzan stayed in the jungle with Boy playing Mr Mom while the film makers sorted out what to do. They needed to replace the irreplacable Maureen O’Sullivan. After a couple films absent a Jane Porter (who is abroad in her home of England, though the original Jane was American) she returns to the film series in Tarzan and the Amazons and is now played by the lovely and capable (but not smoldering, as Ms O’Sullivan certainly was) model Brenda Joyce, who it seemed did much like her stint as Jane all of the time and had a short lived movie career. The film was produced by film maverick Sol Lesser and co-produced and directed by Kurt Neumann. The pair would churn out the last of the great, classic Tarzan films for RKO, from 1945 to 1954, the latter ones starring Lex Barker as the ape man. Tarzan and the Amazons is considered by many fans of the Weissmuller films to be one of the better ones technically and certainly the sets and photography are a notch above many of the earlier films. Under RKO and Lesser the Tarzan films worked on much less of budget than they did under mighty MGM, but the films seem to look and feel more authentic for some strange reason. Though Weissmuller is obviously not inclined to want to do sit ups or skip on second helpings he still does a fine job as the monosyllabic Lord Greystoke. Also returning is Johnny Sheffield as Boy who is getting bigger and less boyish and yet is still curious and susceptible to trusting white men from the outside world. (more…)

FOUR FINE JUNGLE GIRLS BY DAVE STEVENS

Master illustrator Dave Stevens has a natural gift for drawing sexy women in classic poses and so the jungle girl genre suits his imagination just fine. In these four samples you can see he takes the whole thing to a level that is really unreachable by the guys that started all the Tarzan influenced jungle comics back in the 50’s and 60’s. His Sheena work is perfect and the drawing with the bare breasted girl in the tree at the bottom is so stunning in layout and rendering I just do not get tired of looking at it. In some cases I would say it lacks intensity due to the absence of a lush jungle background but here it works just right the way it is. Takes a true artist to so confidently handle empty space.

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Tarzan the Apeman

1932/Director: W.S. Van Dyke / Screenplay: Edgar Rice Burroughs (novel) Cyril Hume (adaptation)

Cast: Johnny Weissmuller, Neil Hamilton, Maureen O’Sullivan, C. Aubrey Smith, Doris Lloyd, Forrester Harvey, Ivory Williams

I recently picked up all the Tarzan movies on DVD here in Beijing and have watched them all a couple times except for Tarzan’s New York Adventure which I never really liked even as a kid, but one night I will pop it in and give it a go. Tarzan the Ape Man was the 1st of the Tarzan films from MGM and Johnny Weissmulller at the time was under contract with the BVD underwear company and MGM had to do some quick bargaining to allow BVD’s spokesman to appear clad only in a loincloth.

The movie only generally follows the Edgar Rice Burroughs narrative of the adventures of Lord Greystoke who is the sole infant survivor of a plane crash in the African Jungle, near the fabled Mutia Escarpment. Rather this movie takes up with the arrival of Jane Parker, played perfectly by Maureen O’Sullivan, in Africa to assist her aging father in his duties there. A safari is soon set up to go to the escarpment in search of the elephant’s graveyard, a veritable Fort Knox of ivory. Tarzan comes in to the story gradually and the direction by W.S Van Dyke in some instances is pretty good, but in others pretty shoddy. For instance in the early scenes where the characters are talking about images that are obviously being back-projected as the proportion and contrast is utterly wrong.
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