East of Borneo (Universal) is a combination of The Green Goddess and Trader Horn, of Hollywood and the Malay peninsula. Its heroine (Rose Hobart) is imperiled by the lechery of a brownskin potentate in silk leggings and by the lions, tigers, leopards, boa constrictors, crocodiles and monkeys of a jungle which seems to be more densely populated than a stadium football game and to contain an even larger collection of queer pelts and extraordinary noises. As is usually the case in films with which wild animals are intimately connected, the story is both quaint and trivial. A married lady penetrates the Malay wilds to find and be reconciled with her husband (Charles Bickford) who is court physician to the potentate. The latter, a villain addicted to oily smiles and platitudes, threatens to throw her husband to the crocodiles in the palace pond. He is foiled by a combination of circumstances which includes the eruption of a volcano whose streams of lava overflow the palace. Rose Hobart and Charles Bickford, thoroughly reconciled, escape in a sampan.
The producers of East of Borneo, instead of sending the whole cast to location east of Borneo, despatched cameramen who photographed, apparently, the entire bestial population of the Malay peninsula. These shots are interspersed with closeups of the actors in a property jungle at Universal City and with a few glimpses of the more docile snakes and crocodiles in the Universal menagerie. Although to a blind-folded spectator the animal noises would be indistinguishable from those of a defective steam radiator, they are effective and even terrifying when combined with good photography. Morbid shots: a man being devoured by alligators in the potentate's pond; a tiger pouncing on a monkey in the rear of the potentate's palace.
Universal's menagerie of 40 animals includes a 52-year-old alligator named Little Joe (after the number four in dice games) because he so frequently comes up, for food. Little Joe, procured from a bankrupt Florida circus, has been incarcerated at Universal City ever since it was built, 17 years ago. Also from a Florida circus came Chimpanzee Joe Martin. Innocent, obedient, clever, Joe Martin performed in Tarzan pictures, was sold back to a circus seven years ago when he became unmanageable, began to annoy other Universal monkeys. He may be repurchased to act in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Largest mammoth ever used in cinemas was Universal's Charlie, an agreeable and intelligent elephant who helped build Universal City by carrying lumber. Charlie was chloroformed and shot when he went wild and tried to kill his trainer. For East of Borneo it was necessary to hire extra alligators from California zoos. Some twelve actors lost fingers or toes while the picture was being made.
Penrod and Sam (First National). A minor cycle of juvenile comedies (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Skippy, Forbidden Adventure) has immeasurably improved this branch of entertainment in the cinema. Where such pictures a few years ago attempted nothing more ambitious than antic farce, as exemplified in the Our Gang comedies, there is now a fashion for being lifelike as well as funny. The fashion is eminently becoming to Penrod and Sam.