Tarzan and His Mate
Short description
Harry Holt returns to Africa at the head of a large ivory expedition, bringing along his friend Martin Arlington. The two men are searching for a legendary elephant graveyard. Holt also hopes to persuade Jane, a woman he once knew, to leave the jungle and come back to civilization with him. What they find instead is Jane living contentedly alongside Tarzan, her companion in the wild. The visitors' plans put them at odds with Tarzan, who has no wish to see the elephants' burial ground plundered, and the situation soon grows more complicated.
Cedric Gibbons directed Tarzan and His Mate, working from a screenplay by James Kevin McGuinness, with Bernard H. Hyman producing for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Johnny Weissmüller and Maureen O'Sullivan play Tarzan and Jane. Neil Hamilton appears as Harry Holt, Paul Cavanagh as Martin Arlington, and Forrester Harvey and Nathan Curry round out the cast. The film followed a first Tarzan outing with the same lead pair and was made on a budget of about one million dollars.
Audiences have received the film well over the years. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.2 from roughly 6,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.6 from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 7.6 from 18 reviews places it slightly above the audience score on IMDb. The film runs 104 minutes and belongs to the action and adventure genres.
What's left behind the scenes
- The elephants in the film were not African, but Indian. Large tusks and ears were attached to the animals to make them look more warlike.
- In this film, Johnny Weissmuller (1904-1984), the actor and athlete who played Tarzan, performed all his stunts himself, which included, among other things, riding a rhinoceros, an elephant, and a hippopotamus.
- During the filming of the crocodile attack scene, a mechanical model of the reptile was used with pouches attached to it containing nigrosin. This mixture of blue-black aniline dyes depicted the monster's blood.
- The film was restored in 1960.
- In the famous bathing scene, it was not Maureen O’Sullivan (1911-1998), the actress who played Jane, who appeared nude. Instead, Josephine McKim (1910-1992), a member of the US Olympic swimming teams in 1928 and 1932, was used as a body double. She wasn't actually nude, but wore a flesh-colored swimsuit.
- Indian elephants with prosthetic tusks and ears stood in for supposed African elephants. The reason was that by the start of filming, the “MGM” film company already owned several of these animals. Furthermore, they were considered easier to train than African elephants.
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