The third MGM Tarzan is famous for being the one where the series became more family orientated in a post-production code way, and certainly there is evidence: Maureen O'Sullivan covers up her body, there is a domestic treehouse (a marvellous construct with various gadgets and what-not), Jane goes for a swim with her clothes on this time, there is more comic relief (more Cheetah and Herbert Mundin as a wacky porter). Also the film was totally re shot after audiences complained about graphicness of violence.It's still not a G rated experience, though - the death toll remains high, Tarzan's troublesome neighbouring natives (who are always up for killing anyone who passes by) knock off a few porters by tying them to trees and ripping them apart, Porter is killed. As for sex, well Tarzan still wears next to nothing and there's a scene where he and Jane go away to a favourite lagoon and he literally deflowers her (its surprisingly explicit).
Parts of this film are quite tired - it takes Tarzan and Jane around 25 minutes to appear, and the adventures of the usual safari (some of Janes vanilla boring relatives - one of whom is played by Benita Hume, who was married to Ronald Colman and George Sanders - and a nasty game hunter) are too similar to the previous films (I'm positive that footage of battles is re-used). The original story sounds better: the Benita Hume character is a bit of a man eater and thus more interesting, the ghost bat sequence sounds spectacular as does the whirlpool (better than the ho-hum elephants coming to the rescue stuff here).
But there are still good things here: the tree house is a lot of fun, the comedy sequences work, the deaths by trees and whirlpools spectacular; most impressive is Johnny Weismuller's performance, as he gets to do some real emoting here, especially when he thinks Jane will leave him. He handles it very well.
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