If Tarzan the Ape Man had lots of sex in it, Tarzan and His Mate, the sequel, takes it to the next level. When this latter movie begins, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) is planning to return to the elephants’ graveyard for the ivory, as he promised to do in the former.  He is teaming up with Martin Arlington (Paul Cavanagh), who has just arrived by boat.  Harry greets him just as Martin is leaving a cabin where he has knocked off a quick piece with a married woman, and not a moment too soon, since her cuckolded husband walks up right after, completely oblivious to his wife’s infidelity.  Martin is such a rake that we immediately don’t like him, not because he has committed adultery, but because it is so easy for him, while the rest of us really have to work at it.

Ivory is only part of the reason Harry plans to go on another safari.  He also hopes to win Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) away from Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) with presents that he had Martin bring with him for her:  silk dresses, nylon stockings, expensive perfume.

After much action and adventure, the safari finally reaches the top of the Mutia Escarpment where Tarzan saves them from some gorillas.  Then we see Jane.  She is in the skimpiest outfit ever, with a loincloth that allows us to view most of her body from the side.  When she greets Harry, she stands close to him with her hips thrust slightly forward, which makes her even more enticing.

At this point, I must vent my displeasure.  When Turner Classic Movies showed this movie recently, it had been modified from a movie in standard format to that of widescreen.  To accomplish this, the top and the bottom of the movie had to be cut off, just the opposite of when a widescreen movie has had the sides cut off to be in standard format.  As a result, part of Jane’s beautiful, almost naked body is cut off, depriving us of a full view.  Whoever did this probably thought he was doing us a favor.  Fortunately, the movie is available in its original, standard format through Xfinity in their On Demand service.

Anyway, Harry shows Jane all the stuff he brought for her, and she gets all dressed up in an evening gown, nylon stockings, and heels.  She puts all this on while alone in a tent, but Martin gets to see her naked body in silhouette from outside as she dresses up.  When she comes out, he gets her to dance with him and then kisses her against her will.  She promises to forget about it, but then Tarzan shows up and pulls out his knife.  Fortunately, it is only the record player that has caught his attention.  Then he sees Jane all dressed up. The clothes are so alluring that he just naturally wants to remove them and have sex.  For that purpose, he insists on taking her up to the tree house he has just put together, carrying her away, leaving Harry and Martin standing there in envious awe.

The next morning, when Tarzan and Jane wake up, she encourages Tarzan not only to say to her, “I love you,” but also to say, “I love my wife.”  So, that means they are married, in case anyone was worried.  No one performed a ceremony, of course, and there is no marriage certificate, but the same could be said of Adam and Eve, and Eve is referred to as Adam’s wife in the Book of Genesis. So, if it’s good enough for the Bible, I guess it’s good enough for this movie.

Jane slept naked with Tarzan, but she tells him she must put the dress back on or else others will think her immodest.  Then they decide to go for a swim. Tarzan rips Jane’s dress off her, and she plunges into the water without a stitch on.  For next couple of minutes, we see a nude Jane swimming with Tarzan.  (For this purpose, a body double was used, that of an Olympic swimmer.)  This footage was removed from the picture before being released but was eventually restored toward the end of the twentieth century.  In his Pre-Code Hollywood:  Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934, Thomas Doherty refers to this scene in his preface.  He saw it in a theater where the audience was shocked into silence, except for a few that gasped.  It wasn’t the nudity per se that shocked them, but the fact that they were seeing it in an old movie.  At that time, “classical Hollywood cinema” called to mind movies that were released after the Production Code was strictly enforced.  Doherty says that seeing such pre-Code movies for the first time was like glimpsing an “alternative film universe,” both fascinating and disorienting, and this movie was a perfect illustration of that.

Tarzan objects to raiding the elephants’ graveyard for ivory, so Martin shoots him while no one else is around, believing that he has killed him.  As a side benefit, that will give Martin a chance to make a move on Jane.  In the end, after much action and adventure as only the jungle can provide, Harry and Martin are dead.  We see Tarzan and Jane riding on an elephant as she leans into him with her almost naked body, looking all soft and warm.  We know that he will soon be giving her all of his hot, jungle love.

After that, the Production Code was strictly enforced, so we see Jane in a dress in Tarzan Escapes (1936). The dress is short, allowing us to see the upper part of her thighs, and she does still run around barefoot, but the days of the skimpy loin cloth are gone.  In Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939), Jane still wears that dress, but now she also starts wearing shoes.  As the title tells us, Tarzan and Jane adopt a son, whom they call “Boy” (Johnny Sheffield).

I guess the thinking was that even though Tarzan and Jane were bound to be having sex, the movies could get past the stern hand of Joseph I. Breen as long as their sexual relationship wasn’t emphasized. But if Jane actually got pregnant and had a baby, that would have been shocking.

Of course, that shock would have been nothing compared to when Loweezy told Snuffy Smith that she was going to have a baby.  Even though they were married, that was the day we were forced us to think of the two of them having sex, something we never wanted to do.