This is one of those 1930's jungle adventure thrillers that serves up a title of a geographical location that is visually identical to any location in any other pre-Code adventure film. Borneo is the largest island in Asia yet any unique features to that island are not present in this film. "East of Borneo" is yet another B-movie flick that was clearly shot in the studio backlot (it was cheaper to do so in those days) and its only real authentic look is the inside of a prince's luscious-looking golden palace and obvious stock wild animal footage.
The mechanical plot is just a set-up - Rose Hobart is Linda Randolph, the "white woman" as prefaced by the Borneo natives who announce her arrival with a series of gongs and drums. She has travelled 6,000 miles to find her husband, Dr. Clark (Charles Bickford), a drunk physician to the island's charmingly devious Prince Hashim (Georges Renavent). There is much squabbling between Linda and Dr. Clark, and the Prince clearly wants the woman for himself (it must get lonely there despite the presence of Lupita Tovar as a servant and various other female servants). We do get lots of close-ups of tigers, monkeys and hundreds of crocodiles - in one particularly intense scene, a bunch of those hungry crocs devour a native and tear him apart.
Still, there is not much to "East of Borneo" and the only real thrills occur during a volcanic eruption after the Prince is...well, if you feel the need, watch the movie for the early foreshadowing bit of dialogue by the Prince himself. Charles Pickford is a dullard at best and Rose Hobart merely stands around as window dressing (she fared better in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" with Fredric March). Georges Revenant is the only one who relishes his Prince role and gives it the spark it needs. The jungle footage, inadvertently thrilling, is indistinguishable from what you might find in a Tarzan flick or several other jungle adventure films.
One fascinating aspect to "East of Borneo" is that an experimental filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, took clips from the film spliced with footage of an eclipse and did a 20-minute short called "Rose Hobart." Though not one of my favorite so-called "Surrealist" films, it is far more galvanizing than anything in this run-of-the-mill flick.
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