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ace it. Few of the Tarzan movies even remotely
approach award-winning quality; many of them are absolutely
awful. And any resemblance between the multilingual, erudite
Tarzan of Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories and the grunting movie
caricature is extremely rare. Nevertheless, the cinematic apeman
struck a chord with audiences from the very beginning (1918).
But it was Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in the Depression-wracked
1930s and on into the 1940s that proved most enduring.
DVD > The Tarzan Collection DVD with six Tarzan films plus the new documentary "Silver Screen King of the Jungle" and vintage shorts with Johnny Weissmuller (4 discs). See details...
Making the Germanic connection for Hollywood's Tarzan is
not as difficult as it might seem. Of the 48 Tarzan
movies made since 1918 (authorized and not), the Romanian/Austrian-born
muscular Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller only appeared
in an even dozen. But despite the numerous other celluloid
dramas about the swinging King of the Jungle and the 17 other
actors who portrayed him over the years, it is Weissmuller
who is still most closely associated with the Tarzan character,
just as Maureen O’Sullivan (1911-1998) will forever be identified
as Tarzan’s mate, Jane. Few, if any, of the many later Tarzan
films can match the character and charm of the Weissmuller-O’Sullivan
films.
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| Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan)
and Johnny Sheffield (“Boy”). The
Boy character was introduced in Tarzan
Finds a Son in 1939. Sheffield was Weissmuller’s
personal choice for the role of his son. |
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Weissmuller's Tarzan was certainly no genius. The “reel”
Tarzan hardly spoke at all, much less the English, French,
German, Swahili, “Ape” and Arabic of Burroughs' “real”
Tarzan, unless you count “Ungawa!”
– a phrase that apparently can mean almost anything. Even
O'Sullivan conceded that her onscreen mate wasn’t much of
an actor, but Weissmuller had a certain something that kept
him in his loinclothed crusader role for a decade and a half.
Following the Tarzan series, he made another 16 Jungle
Jim movies (“Tarzan with clothes on”) for Columbia.
Weissmuller, using his own name rather than “Jungle Jim” in the last
three films of the series, made his final screen appearance (except
for two 1970s cameos) in Devil Goddess in 1955.
See our special
Interview with Johnny Weissmuller, Jr.
The Austro-Hungarian Germanic connection
Peter Jonas Weissmüller was born on June 2, 1904 in what is now Romania but was in the year of his birth part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire. The boy who would later become a U.S. Olympic swimming champion and film star—and who would later falsely claim (for Olympic reasons) Windber, Pennsylvania as his birthplace—was the son of ethnic Austrians living in Banat, a region that, like neighboring Transylvania (Siebenbürgen in German), had been populated with Germanic settlers as early as the 13th century. As late as 1919, Banat's population was an ethnic mix of Romanians, Austrians, Serbs and Hungarians, with the German-speaking Austrians comprising 23 percent of the total, second only to the Romanians in number.
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Weissmuller was born in the tiny hamlet of Freidorf
(“free village” in German, Hungarian Szabadfalu) not far from Timisoara (Ger., Temeschburg).
Even today the area around Timisoara is dotted with small
towns bearing German names such as Gottlob, Johanisfeld and
Liebling, reflecting the German ethnic influence on the region.
Weissmuller’s family left Banat for America in 1904, shortly
after Johnny’s birth, settling first in Pennsylvania, where
many other Austrians and Germans lived (and where brother
Peter was born in 1905), and later in Chicago, another Germanic
stronghold and the home of Weissmuller's maternal grandparents. The
original German family name Weissmüller translates literally
as “white miller” or “wheat miller” (Weizen).
Johnny grew up in German-American communities, first in Pennsylvania
and later in Chicago, where he attended parochial and public
schools. Although studio publicity and some Weissmuller biographies
claim he attended the University of Chicago, this is not true.
Weissmuller was probably a high school dropout, leaving school
no later than about the time his swimming career went into high gear
(10th grade), if not sooner.
A spindly, almost skinny child (but not “sickly” as some bios
state), Johnny took up swimming as a boy. At the age of 16
he began training with Illinois Athletic Club swimming coach
Bill Bacharach, who helped Johnny reach his Olympic potential.
Weissmuller went on to win five Olympic gold medals and many
other world and national swimming titles. In 1922 he set a new
world record by swimming 100 meters in less than a minute.
He won his gold medals in the 1924 (Paris) and 1928 (Amsterdam)
Olympics.
POSTERS > Tarzan Posters and Photos
NEXT > Weissmuller
Part 2
MORE > Interview with Johnny Weissmuller, Jr.
Copyright © 1997-2008 Hyde Flippo
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