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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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