BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
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There's a scene in 1942's "Tarzan's New York Adventure" where Johnny Weissmuller, the hunkiest of all the incarnations of Edgar Rice Burroughs' famous swinger, and Maureen O'Sullivan, his Mayfair squeeze, find themselves being fitted for new clothes by a crew of Hong Kong tailors who just happen to have set up shop in some African outpost. Tarzan and Jane are on their way to the States, to rescue their adopted son, Boy, from an evil circus promoter who's lured him away, and Jane has explained to her husband that he'll need to suit up properly for his first trip into civilization. The problem is, nothing off the rack fits him: Weissmuller needs an athletic fit if anyone ever did, and every suit jacket he tries on immediately splits up the back. "Jane need clothes," he says in frustration. "Tarzan better without clothes." And you know -- he's got a point.
But if you take a fresh look at any of the six Weissmuller-O'Sullivan Tarzan movies (five of which are part of a 32-film Tarzan movie marathon presented by cable's American Movie Classics, June 6-8), it becomes pretty clear that the former Jane Porter, who snubbed London society to become a jungle queen and never looked back, doesn't keep the guy around just because he knows which berries are safe to eat. Some 60 years ago, the Weissmuller Tarzan -- usually written off as a monosyllabic stud -- was really an astonishingly advanced model for the modern evolved male. Forget Robert Bly: Tarzan knew how to get in touch with his masculinity without attending a single seminar. To understand Tarzan's appeal (if Weissmuller's pectorals don't do the trick), it helps to look at his competitors in the dating game. In 1934's "Tarzan and His Mate," Jane's head can't be turned by an old suitor who brings her dresses, silk stockings and perfume, certain he'll be able to remind her how impossible it is for a woman to live without such things. She likes the presents, but she's hardly taken in by them, and when you get a look at the square who brought them for her, you can see why -- it's a young Neil Hamilton, Commissioner Gordon from TV's "Batman." "Remember, there's only one man that means anything to me, and that's Tarzan," O'Sullivan's Jane says. Her upper-crusty accent and her delicately fluted consonants can't hide what she really means: Who wants some wiener in safari pants when you've already got the lay of the jungle? Part of the draw is Weissmuller himself. There have been other Tarzans, but none has ever been quite his equal. The AMC festival includes a number of notable Tarzan films, starting with the 1918 silent "Tarzan of the Apes," starring Elmo Lincoln. (In order to bag some extra-realistic footage, Lincoln reportedly killed a real, if very old, lion.) Other Tarzans represented in the marathon, which covers the movie series through the 1960s, include Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, Mike Henry and Jock Mahoney, who should get some sort of medal for bravery for first taking on the role at 42, the age at which Weissmuller retired. The marathon also features a one-hour documentary, "Investigating Tarzan," featuring interviews with O'Sullivan and the late Weissmuller. And it's Weissmuller and O'Sullivan who really are the king and queen of the jungle. The Tarzan-Jane dynamic in the Weissmuller-O'Sullivan movies -- "Tarzan the Ape Man" (1932), "Tarzan and His Mate" (1934), "Tarzan Escapes" (1936), "Tarzan Finds a Son" (1939), "Tarzan's Secret Treasure" (1941) and, perhaps the most delightful of all, "Tarzan's New York Adventure" (1942) -- isn't some submerged rape fantasy. Weissmuller's Tarzan doesn't just accidentally fulfill Jane's every wish: He works damn hard at it -- so hard that you have to stop and remind yourself that these were movies made by men, not women. Tarzan's vocabulary may be limited, but he's not a bonehead. As obvious as it is that killing wildebeest and wrestling alligators make him feel like a manly man, he gets as much pleasure out of learning the ropes of love and romance from Jane (and given O'Sullivan's trilling laugh, flirty Irish eyes and lithe curviness, it's not hard to see why). In "Tarzan and His Mate," we see the two of them in their little love nest high above the ground, buoyed by a soft bed of fluff that might be ostrich down or lion fur. He blows in her ear to wake her, and the first words out of his mouth, spoken as two discrete, flat, but enthusiastic phrases, are "Good morning, I love you!" "Tarzan Escapes" shows us the luxurious jungle "townhouse" he's made for her, complete with an elevator and a ceiling fan, and whose kitchen, she tells a visitor, was built to her specifications. It's easy enough to look at the Weissmuller-O'Sullivan pictures simply as remnants of the golden age of Hollywood -- the sort of thing that has made our parents and grandparents say, until we just can't take it anymore, "In our day, you didn't see everything, and believe you me, it was a lot sexier!" But the sexiness of these particular Tarzan films transcends kitsch, corniness and that sickening old-timey concept of courting and sparking. The meaning of the Weissmuller-O'Sullivan Tarzan movies -- the unspoken telegram that zips back and forth between the two actors -- is the joy of making jungle whoopee. And yet what really makes their coupling sizzle is the abundant tenderness between the two of them. In "Tarzan Escapes," Jane is sought out by English relatives who beg her to return to England to sign a document so that some money she's inherited will transfer over to them. She doesn't care a whit for the money, but she does care about leaving Tarzan. When she tells him she has to leave the jungle temporarily, he doesn't understand, and he storms off, needing to be alone. The footage that follows is slightly clumsy, and yet surprisingly moving. He leans against a tree, covering his face as if he's dead-set on hiding his feelings even from the birds and monkeys around him. He flops to the ground, his eyes still hidden. When he's done with his sulking, he returns to Jane, and as she explains to him that she will come back ("Tarzan makes me alive," she says simply, with a directness that's touching), his eyes look suddenly just the slightest bit liquid, and you can see deep into them. Weissmuller was a fine specimen of a man first and foremost. But even if his capabilities as an actor are limited, the sorrow you see in his eyes at that moment is, pure and simple, the work of a performer who's riding on his instincts -- and they don't fail him. Their sexual politics aside, the Tarzan movies are often deeply conventional. The same plots -- and even the same footage -- recur from film to film. And these pictures are racially indecorous at best, with throngs of scantily clad chanting natives scurrying through the jungle, hell-bent on doing bad deeds just for the hell of it. (Although it bears mentioning that greedy white men don't come off particularly well, either.) But if you look past the artistic shortcuts and racial cluelessness of these six Tarzan movies, much of what's left is pure magic: They're the most charming series of adventure movies ever made in this country. Groups of elephants amble in sync as if they were corps of tubby dancers; lion cubs trot out of the brush looking for trouble, flirting and gamboling and begging to be cuddled. (Cheetah, Tarzan and Jane's chimp sidekick, asks for trouble by pulling their stubby tails.) And the visual lushness of these movies suggest tropical colors even in black-and-white. In "Tarzan and His Mate," Tarzan, wounded by an evil white man's gunshot, emerges from beneath the water's surface, face down and spread out like a starfish on a hippo's smooth, silvery back. And every one of these pictures features a sensuous swimming scene ("Swim!" Tarzan says, again and again, a suggestion erotic in its stripped-bare austerity). The most infamous -- and loveliest -- of these is the one in the uncut version of "Tarzan and His Mate" (airing on AMC at 9 p.m. Friday), in which Weissmuller, a former Olympic swimming champ, performs a shimmery underwater ballet with a completely nude Jane. Weissmuller's partner isn't O'Sullivan here, but Olympic gold medalist Josephine Kim, and because "Tarzan and His Mate" was made before the Hays Code, she really is totally nude. But those glimpses of T&A notwithstanding, Tarzan is the one who's begging to be objectified here. O'Sullivan's Jane, for all her sweetness and her infinite well of patience, is clearly his intellectual superior, although she's far too kind to rub it in. "Tarzan, Jane, hurt me, boy, love it, Jane," Tarzan says during one of his first English lessons in "Tarzan the Ape Man." "Darling, that's quite a sentence," she says by way of encouragement, even as she pokes fun at him with her rippling little laugh. And when you think about it, it's not a bad sentence, capturing as it does the incomprehensibility and the swimmy bliss that make up this thing we call love. It's easy to see why it never occurs to Jane to spirit her mate away from their jungle love den. "I wonder what you'd look like dressed?" she muses aloud in "Tarzan the Ape Man," but then the thought flits away like a bird of paradise. If Tarzan lived in civilization, he'd be the kind of guy who'd always have to be reminded which fork to use, who'd always get hot dog relish all over his front, whose wife would surely have to pick out each and every one of his shirts. You could dress him up, but you sure couldn't take him out. Then again -- why on earth would you want to?
Stephanie Zacharek is a regular contributor to Salon.
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