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Ungawa! Tarzan's timber-rattling call defies transcription, so we'll fall back on this all-purpose locution to salute a fine new box set of MGM's six Tarzan films. "Ungawa!" is the perfect choice whenever you can't think of the right thing to say. It appears to mean Come here, Go away, Look out, Jump, and There's a cobra behind you. Just think how a sharply enunciated "Ungawa!" could clear a Starbucks when you don't want to wait in line.
The Tarzan Collection
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But Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan's inventor and author of 24 Tarzan novels, can't be credited with that primal cry. Like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Burroughs' characters took on a life of their own. Once only a gleam in the eye of a pencil-sharpener salesman, they became a vast industry, the first to be "synergized" into comics, movies, toys, and other formats and marketed around the world. Viewers who complain that the MGM movies do not follow the books shouldn't blame the filmmakers; Burroughs insisted that the movie plots be wholly different, and not poach his own proprietary ideas. "Ungawa!" comes to us courtesy of Cyril Hume, screenwriter of Tarzan the Ape Man, the inaugural film in the MGM series. (Burroughs would not permit MGM even to use his own title, Tarzan of the Apes.)
Burroughs had a right to be bossy. He crafted a character who set fire to imaginations around the world, throughout the 20th century. Burroughs came late to fiction, having tried just about everything else first (cavalry rider, gold miner, railway cop, accountant, shopkeeper, patent medicine salesman). It was while he was thumbing through some pulp magazines, checking on ad space he'd purchased for pencil sharpeners, that inspiration struck. He realized, as he later said, "If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten."
He was right. Burroughs had no talent for dialogue, and he communicated ideas with the ponderous self-importance of an after-dinner bore, but he wrote action scenes that make your hair stand on end. It was just the thing for the new storytelling medium, movies. The novel Tarzan of the Apes was a best-seller in 1914, and a hit movie (starring the pleasingly named Elmo Lincoln) in 1918.
When we think of Tarzan, however, we're probably picturing the smoothly muscled form of champion swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Here he is, making his first appearance in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) a full half-hour into the film, swinging through the treetops and then crouching on a bough to gaze intently at the maiden below. He's appraising Maureen O'Sullivan, but he'd better look quick because she was a very busy Irish lass in the 1930's. In the course of that decade alone, O'Sullivan appeared in an astounding 43 films, ranging from Anna Karenina and David Copperfield to The Thin Man, Strange Interlude, and the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races. Here she portrays pert and highly verbal safari sister Jane Parker (not Jane Porter; Burroughs reserved that name for his character).
Weissmuller is wearing a whole lot o' nothing, and looks perfectly at ease. According to his son, Johnny Weissmuller, Jr., this was a prime consideration during casting; director Woody Van Dyke wanted someone who "could undress naturally, who looked natural undressed." Weissmuller won five Olympic gold medals and reportedly never lost a competition. He has enormous paddling hands and feet, and looks relaxed in a Speedo or less (in his one prior film, he wore only a fig leaf). He was under contract as an underwear model when he was tapped for the Tarzan role.
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