Herman Brix, 100, Olympian and Film Tarzan

Herman Brix, who died Saturday at 100, was a record-breaking shot-putter who went on to star in Tarzan movies, in which he invented his own version of the Tarzan yell, transliterated by one critic as “Mmmmmmm-annnnngannnnn-eeeeeee.”Brix’s was no competition for the more famous version developed by the far more prolific Tarzan portrayer, Johnny Weissmuller, along with his coaches at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A dozen or so other actors played the vine swinger before the 1960s, including Olympians Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe. But Brix’s Tarzan, in “The New Adventures of Tarzan” (1935) and “Tarzan and the Green Goddess” (1938), was unique in that he was the only one to play Tarzan the way his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, had written him, as the multilingual, Oxford-educated member of the English nobility, Lord Greystoke.Brix did so to little acclaim, though, and soon dropped out of Tarzan films, took acting lessons, adopted the screen name Bruce Bennett, and went on to a series of supporting roles in films like “Mildred Pierce” (1945) and “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), in which he played a down-on-his-luck American who joins Humphrey Bogart in a doomed quest for gold.Born in Tacoma, Wash., in 1906, Brix worked at lumber camps before attending the University of Washington, where he played in the 1925 Rose Bowl and became a star javelin thrower and shot-putter. He was a three-time All Coast tackle and a six-time national shot-put champion. The sports writer Grantland Rice once called him “America’s greatest athlete.”Brix tossed the shot at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, winning a silver medal just behind another American, John Kuck. The pair later toured the country in a series of exhibitions during which Brix established new world records.In the early 1930s, Brix began making athletic instruction films and was considered for “Tarzan the Ape Man” (1932), losing out to Weissmuller after injuring a shoulder. He was hired for what amounted to a competing franchise when Burroughs, who disliked Weissmuller’s grunting nature-boy Tarzan, decided to make his own Tarzan films. “This was a man who had mastered both the jungle and civilization,” Brix told the Christian Science Monitor in 1999. “It was a very compelling idea for its time.”“The New Adventures of Tarzan” was shot in late 1934 under difficult conditions in Guatemala, where a storm nearly wiped out the production before it got a chance to start. Brix did all his own stunts and was seriously injured when he attempted to dive into a cataract to save the love interest — Ula Vale, not Jane Parker.Originally released as a serial and then as a film, “The New Adventures of Tarzan” flopped when MGM refused to screen it at its theaters. The film did well abroad, and better in America when it was recut and rereleased in 1938 as “Tarzan and the Green Goddess.” Despite the genuinely exotic locations, the film was hardly a model of accuracy, featuring rhinos, giraffes, and lions prowling Mayan temples. Sadly, conditions in Guatemala ruined the soundtrack. It is seldom screened today.Brix as Bruce Bennett went on to a workmanlike career in Hollywood; his turn as Joan Crawford’s well-meaning first husband in “Mildred Pierce” is generally considered his high-water mark. He appeared in dozens of films in the 1940s and then moved on to television in the 1950s. He was the kind of actor who appears once as a guest star on every series.Brix mostly retired in the 1960s and devoted himself to business, first for a slot machine company and later as a real estate investor.He cooperated in a 2001 memoir, “Please Don’t Call Me Tarzan.”

Herman Brix, 100, Olympian and Film Tarzan

Herman Brix, 100, Olympian and Film Tarzan

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