Douglas Messerli | East of Eden [Introduction] / 2022

east of eden

                        “If money is the root of all evil, I’ll take the whole tree.”

by Douglas Messerli

 

American actress Rose Hobart (1906-2000) was born on May Day, the daughter of a cellist of the New York Symphony Orchestra, Paul Hobart, and his wife, opera singer Marguerite Kefer. Her parents divorced when she was seven years old, and soon after she and her sister Polly were sent to France to live with their grandmother, returning home with at the beginning of World War I, when they attended boarding schools.

      At age 15 (she telling authorities she was 18) Hobart was cast in the stage play Liliom by Ferenc Molnár (the work that would later be adapted into the musical Carousel) which debuted in New York on in September 1923. Two years later she played the role of Charmian in George Bernard Shaw’s Ceasar and Cleopatra, and became one of the original members of Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, making her London debut in 1928, and later touring with Noël Coward in The Vortex and performing opposite of Helen Hayes in What Every Woman Knows.

      In 1930 she was asked to play Julie in the film version of Liliom, and would play in over 40 motion pictures in a period 20 years, including in some highly memorable works including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Scandal for Sale (1932), Susan and God (1940), and Ziegfeld Girl (1941).

      Certainly not among her best movies, but in a role that made her memorable for reasons I describe below, she played the role of Linda Randolph in East of Borneo (1931), a woman who seeks for her husband on the island of Marado, just east of Borneo. She travels there, despite the fact that she is told that Marado’s jungles are far too dangerous for a white woman, suffering dangerous rafting rides and encounters with crocodiles. Eventually she discovers that her husband is now the personal physician to the island’s “enigmatic prince,” who soon also lusts after Linda, creating a dangerous love triangle. The film was directed by George Melford—whose most notable production was Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik—with a screenplay by Edwin H. Knopf (brother to publisher Alfred A. Knopf and who later became a noted producer) and Dale van Every (who wrote the screenplays to Marianne and Captains Courageous).

       In 1949 the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hobart, due to her commitment to improving working conditions for actors early in her career, which she later described in her autobiography in these terms: “On my first three pictures, they worked me 18 hours a day and then complained because I was losing so much weight that I had to put stuff in my evening dress.... When I did East of Borneo (1931), that schlocky horror film...we shot all night long. They started at o’clock at night and finished at 5 in the morning. For two solid weeks, I was working with alligators, jaguars, and pythons out on the back lot. I thought, ‘This is acting?’ It was ridiculous. We were militant about the working conditions. We wanted an eight-hour day like everybody else.”

     Hobart had also served on the board of the Screen Actors Guild and was an active participant in the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, a group which anti-Communists like Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed was subversive. Lee J. Cobb named her as a Communist.

    Although Hobart claimed she was never a member of the Communist Party, she refused to cooperate, instead reading a prepared statement that concluded, "In a democracy no one should be forced or intimidated into a declaration of his principles. If one does yield to such pressure, he gives away his birthright. I am just mulish enough not to budge when anyone uses force on me." In 1950, Hobart was also listed in the anti-Communist blacklisting publication, Red Channels. Hobart never worked in film again, although she continued to perform on stage and in the 1960s played in several television roles.

    Perhaps none of this has a direct bearing on the fact that reclusive artist Joseph Cornell had years earlier become obsessed with the actor.

    In this short collation of two films, I bring together my discussion of Joseph Cornell’s strange and loving tribute to Hobart and experimental filmmaker Ken Jacob’s loving satire of that work.

    Neither of these films is openly gay, but both can be said to represent audacious examples of camp adoration—Cornell of Rose Hobart and Ken Jacobs of Joseph Cornell—that represents a truly gay sensibility, even if neither director is homosexual. Perhaps we have simply to perceive these works as examples of how the gay exaggeration of love and its expression—born, perhaps, from the realization in the gay world of just how difficult it was to openly express love coupled with a self-conscious cynicism that had evolved from that attempt to demonstrate and maintain it—highly influenced even the perceptibly straight world.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).