Some may know him as Bruce Bennett, which is what he called himself later in life when the roles had dried up, and he thought it was perhaps because of his unmarketable name. Herman Brix was not only the man who should have been the original Tarzan, he is considered by those who truly know stuff as the only perfect Tarzan. Phew! Now, surely, you are sitting up.
Brix, spiffingly handsome and with a body one could only call glorious, was the silver medallist in the shot put at the 1928 Olympics, and then went to Hollywood. He was signed for the first Tarzan movie, but broke his shoulder doing a football film in 1931, and Johnny Weissmuller got the role instead. Weissmuller was a big lunk, but he married five times, and became to this day the most famous Tarzan of them all. As heroically American as Joe DiMaggio.
Brix, meanwhile, was signed by Tarzan writer Edgar Rice Burroughs for 1935's The New Adventures of Tarzan, a TV series shot in Guatemala. I picked this up on DVD for $5 last Thursday afternoon, and I was eye-smacked from the very first frame. Not ear-smacked though, the sound quality is dreadful. Apparently they blamed this on atmospheric conditions in Guatemala.
Liars. They just used very cheap equipment.
No worries, this is for the eyes, not the ears. Or the brain.
The story lines are outrageously glimpy. But when Tarzan gets atop one of them swinging vines to move from one point to another, usually to save a white woman from distress, even pulling one out of a pit of leopards where she is being eaten like sushi, then you realise that action movies really haven't come very far at all these past 76 years.
And each time Tarzan pulls his trusty knife from his skimpy loincloth and kills a lion or a dundee of crocodiles, he does that amazing ape-call thing which people have tried to copy for decades.
The best description I could find for Herman Brix's quite unique ape-call was that of a man who has stubbed his toe and is trying to stifle an obscenity. Perfect.
But the thing about the Herman Brix Tarzan is he is the only one exactly like the Tarzan of the original books - an English aristocrat with a fine vocabulary and a keen brain, a gentleman, loyal and steadfast. Sure he was raised by cichlidian apes since the age of 1, but (this is the sheer greatness of the man) he can still don a fine suit and sit at the captain's table when making a sailing journey back to London. Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan is Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, a primitive savage with monosyllables and underarm stench. Brix does have tendencies endemic to the jungle - he kills with a flick of the wrist, even lions, and eats raw meat, which he has to have killed himself. But he is a gastronome as well; he likes to bury the meat so it will become tenderised by putrefaction.
Burroughs had readably racist dialogue in his books - Swedes had bad complexions and Russians cheated at cards - but the dialogue is empty in these movies. Nevertheless, Brix sails above every word on his never-ending vines, and when the camera closes in on his perfect face, it's easy to see why every woman in every episode falls hopelessly in love with him.
Herman Brix remained physically magnificent until he died at the age of 100. A lifelong thrillseeker who did all his movie stunts, his final skydive, from 10,000ft, was taken when he was 96.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
