The film drops Edgar Rice Burroughs’ explanation of Tarzan’s background – in fact, the explanation about Tarzan being a British aristocrat, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, never turned up in the Johnny Weissmuller films and such origins would not make a cinematic appearance until the 1960s. Tarzan the Ape Man was made before the rest of the Johnny Weissmuller films turned the Tarzan and Jane relationship into a cosy jungle parody of middle-class life, before the addition of youthful sidekicks, before the addition of scene-stealing animals and before an endless series of big game hunter/evil villagers plots turned the series into the most routine of formulas. Tarzan the Ape Man has a freshness that even its reduction to stock footage in later entries has not eclipsed. The animal action scenes are exciting and genuinely amazing – attack by water buffaloes as the explorers cross a lake on raft, with native bearers being tossed into the lake and (in one amazingly graphic piece of off-screen suggestion) being devoured by crocodiles; fabulous scenes of Tarzan conducting acrobatics and swinging through the trees in vast 40 foot loops; he wrestling leopards and gazelles; an amazing sequence where, while wounded, Tarzan is forced to fight two lions before an elephant rescues him, carrying him away with one arm wrapped around its trunk and douses him in water by the river; the elephant attack on the pygmy village at the end.

The story comes underlined by a dreamy romanticism – unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film plays the story less as an adventure story and more as an oddball romance. Tarzan was played by former five times Olympic gold medal winning swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller. Weissmuller acts like a churlish chimpanzee and is amusingly paired with the wonderfully bubbly and excitable Maureen O’Brien, who became the screen’s quintessential Jane. Watching them play in the treehut is fun and the scenes with them frolicking in the water, playing without being able to verbally communicate, are quite sweet.

The film has many crudities as a result of the time it was made – it was only 1932, five years after the advent of sound film, so the film lacks a musical score, something it seems to cry out for during the action scenes. There are long fades between scenes and few closeups. Technically, the film is crude – one can see the painted backdrops that make up many of the junglescapes, and in a scene where Jane and her father watch two groups of tribes the two actors have merely been planted in front of a back projection screen.

Tarzan has become one of the most prolific screen characters of all time, producing some 80 films and 5 different tv series. Other direct adaptations of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel include Tarzan of the Apes (1918), the silent Elmo Lincoln version; Tarzan the Ape Man (1959) starring Denny Miller; Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), a softcore version featuring Bo Derek and with Miles O’Keeffe as Tarzan; Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), a lavish version starring Christopher Lambert; and Tarzan (1999), the Disney animated version.

The other Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films are:– Tarzan and His Mate (1934), Tarzan Escapes (1936), Tarzan Finds a Son (1939), Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941), Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), Tarzan Triumphs (1943), Tarzan’s Desert Mystery (1943), Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946), Tarzan and the Huntress (1947) and Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948). Maureen O’Sullivan (later the mother of Mia Farrow) appeared as Jane in the first six films.