The New Pictures

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.

Following, but not to the letter, the stories concocted by Author Booth Tarkington, Penrod (Leon Janney) steals a letter which his sister is writing to an admirer, reads it aloud in lieu of an English composition. He and his friends belong to the In-or-In Club of which Penrod is president. When obliged to initiate a sniveling little teacher's pet, they paddle him till he needs a doctor, slick down his hair so thoroughly with tar that he makes his next appearance with a shaved skull. Penrod and his friend Sam have a fight at a birthday party. Penrod's dog dies and is buried near the clubhouse. A boy named Bitts gets his father to buy the lot on which the clubhouse stands but Penrod's father buys it back again. The clubhouse is a cozy shanty, ornamented outside by a piece of tin, a portion of rubber-hose, furnished inside with barrels of paint, old packing boxes, a tin-gavel and a periscope made out of a broken mirror. Most enthusiastic members are two small blackamoors, Herman Washington (James Robinson) and Verman Washington (Robert Dandridge), who are so young & ignorant that they are unable to read the club regulations.

Leon Janney is a little too pretty and a shade too self-conscious for Penrod but his laugh, so incongruous with his speech that it sounds like a ventriloquist's giggle, is the most infectious sound in the picture. Sam (Junior Coghlan) has a flat Irish face, eyes that narrow pleasantly in anger; the short right with which he starts his fight with Penrod is better timed than Carnera's (see p. 22). Good shots: nice little Georgie Bassett doing a minuet at the birthday party while Penrod and Sam are fighting upstairs; the In-or-In Club preparing to initiate a new member. Bad shot: Penrod whittling with his forefinger on the back of his knife blade.

Palmy Days (United Artists). Eddie Cantor belongs to the school of clowns whose humor derives from ineffectuality; a certain eccentric excitability makes him sometimes hilariously funny. His gaiety is without grace; it lacks the thin, almost horrible insanity of the Marx Brothers and it is seldom frankly pathetic, like Chaplin's. He is a culprit from a comic strip and no one would be surprised if, when something hit him on the head, it gave the sound of "plop" or "zowie."

Like Whoopee, his most recent picture, Palmy Days (produced by Samuel Goldwyn) is in musicomedy form though not in technicolor. The setting is a baking factory with a gymnasium on the roof. Here the comely girls who work in the factory are seen going through body-building exercises which they do not seem to need. Cantor, stooge for a fortune teller who has hoodwinked the factory owner, takes charge of the plant as efficiency expert. He proves his efficiency by showing the owner how to make a funny noise, by putting on a floorshow at the bakery's lunch room, in which he wears blackface and sings. Finally, as usually happens to him, Cantor is captured by the tallest lady in the cast (Charlotte Greenwood). According to the definitions by which Whoopee was fun, Palmy Days, though it contains jokes as old as the one about the capital of the U.S. being half what it used to be, would be funnier. Good shot: Cantor, disguised as a French savant, telling the fortune teller how to tell fortunes.

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