In 1942, Donald Crisp won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. I don’t know Donald Crisp and I’ve never seen the movie he was nominated for, How Green Was My Valley. The other nominees included Walter Brennan (the gimpy Grandpa on The Real McCoys), Charles Coburn for the Devil and Miss Jones (no, not The Devil In Miss Jones) and Sydney Greenstreet for the Maltese Falcon (whom Peter Lorre refers to in the movie as “you bloated idiot”).
Somebody got overlooked. Check out this soliloquy from Tarzan’s New York Adventure, a 1942 feature that obviously needed to pad out a couple of minutes.
In the same movie, there’s also this scene, played with an actor named Mantan Moreland, whom Moe Howard tried to recruit for the Three Stooges when Shemp died in 1955. The studio, as you could guess, nixed that idea pretty quickly.
Cheetah’s role in the Tarzan movies evolved from Tarzan’s brother in Tarzan of the Apes in 1932, to child surrogate once Tarzan hooked up with Jane, to surefire comedy relief. I’m ignoring the reports that several chimps played Cheetah over the course of the Tarzan movies, or that the 80-year old chimp purported to be Cheetah who died a few years back may not have been the real deal. There wasn’t an actor of his generation more fun to watch.
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