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Greetings, and welcome to VIEWING THE CLASSICS. Here you'll find capsule reviews of vintage movies from the early days of cinema through the 1970s, with a special emphasis on sci-fi, horror, and mystery movies. Be sure to check out the Pages links, where you can find a Film Index of all my reviews, links to the reviews organized by cast members, directors, and other contributors, and links to my reviews of the films of talented young director Joshua Kennedy.

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Monday, September 2, 2013

East Of Borneo (1931)

Starring Rose Hobart, Charles Bickford, Georges Renavent, Lupita Tovar, Noble Johnson
Directed by George Melford
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A beautiful woman journeys deep into the jungle in search of her estranged husband, and finds him on a volcanic island ruled over by a sadistic native prince.

This is an entertaining jungle thriller, headlined by Hobart, very beautiful and appealing and believable in her role- it's hard to figure why she didn't become a bigger star.  Melford does a good job of staging the jungle perils, and Renavent makes a nice villain.  The film's showpiece is a well-executed sequence of a native's doomed swim through a river swarming with crocodiles.  The only shortcoming for me was the lack of dialogue for Tovar, who plays a native servant jealous of Bickford's wife, and her character would have been better defined with some dialogue.  She's better known for playing the female lead in the Spanish-language version of Dracula, released the same year, so perhaps her accent or knowledge of English played into this.

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