Mulheres e Homens

According to Cecil B. DeMille's autobiography, Four Frightened People was the last film he made that both lost money and was not of an historical nature. Seeing it today, especially in the edited 78 minute version of it, I can see why. Not even Paramount splurging for location shooting in Hawaii to stand in for the Malay jungle and DeMille's eye for spectacle could save this one.

Our Four Frightened People are spinster geography teacher Claudette Colbert, newspaper correspondent William Gargan, chemist Herbert Marshall and the wife of a British colonial official Mary Boland. Believe me this is not four people you would want in a foxhole.

The bulk of the cuts to Four Frightened People seem to come at the beginning of the film where in the short version we see the radio operator requesting help because plague is on board the ship. Gargan who is a take charge sort, commanders a lifeboat and takes Marshall, Boland, and an unwilling Colbert on board to land, lest the plague outbreak become known in the steerage where a lot of Chinese coolies are packed in like on a slave ship. The next thing we know is that the four find Leo Carrillo, a mixed blood native to help guide them to safety.

A whole lot of introductory material to the characters is lost here. My guess is that because Four Frightened People came in before the Code, Paramount made drastic cuts to try and salvage the film in a re-release which occurred the following year. As far as the story narrative was concerned it made it incoherent.

Not that I think there was much there to begin. The two men of course end up fighting over Colbert and Mary Boland just goes about in her usual oblivious way to the dangers. As for Claudette she turns from a woman frightened of life, to Sheena Queen of the Jungle as she parades around in a leopard skin outfit that must have been borrowed from Maureen O'Sullivan at MGM. The transformation is not terribly convincing.

Color might have salvaged this somewhat we were two years away from the modern Technicolor process that Paramount did in its first outdoor film in The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine. Curiously enough DeMille for all his mastery of the technical side of film making did not do a color feature until Northwest Mounted Police in 1941. The Hawaiian scenery looks beautiful, far more convincing than some standard jungle set on a studio back lot.

One other story DeMille told was that Claudette Colbert had a strong aversion more than most to little creepy crawly critters and in Hawaii many unusual ones thrive. On the first day of shooting she sat down on a centipede and became hysterical. How she got through the film God only knows. But the very next film Claudette did was It Happened One Night and that was her Oscar winning part. Good recompense for going through Four Frightened People.

I wasn't crazy about this film and neither was its director.

Four Frightened People is an interesting, if badly named, survival thriller from the 1930s. It was somewhat ahead of its times, with a brief nude sequence and a muted feminist theme, with an active heroine by the standards of its time.

The film follows four people who flee a cruise ship that has been infested by the bubonic plague. They land in a jungle portion of Malay and have to travel through the wilderness to get back to civilization. Along the way, they confront wild animals and hostile indigenous people.

This film takes some unexpected turns that make it more interesting. At the beginning, we assume the heroine will end up romantically attached to the brash leader of the group. However, DeMille takes the plot in a much different and more satisfying direction, making good use of character development to defy our expectations.

Four Frightened People also defies expectations through its treatment of Claudette Colbert's heroine. Initially a whiny, easily pushed around schoolmarm, she becomes arguably the most influential member of the group, pushing the men to become more proactive. Although the film's ending and a few damsel in distress scenes undermine the proto-feminist theme, the film is still quite progressive for 1934.

The film's content is also surprisingly risqué. At one point, we see Claudette Colbert's character showering nude, and the supporting female character gets Malay women to deny their husbands sex.

One aspect that does date the film is an undercurrent of racism. The depiction of the indigenous people is definitely patronizing, particularly the character of Montague. Still, the film is far better in those terms than other old jungle films such as White Pongo.

"Four Frightened People" is a very, very unusual movie. That's because although it was directed by the infamous Cecil B. DeMille, it's the most unlike his films of any I have seen. It is not an epic film in the least and seems to have very little in common with his other films. This is NOT a criticism--especially since so many of his other films emphasize spectacle instead of characterizations. So, this smaller sort of film is most welcome. But could it provide rich, full characters that so many of his other films could not?

The film begins aboard a ship in the Pacific. The crew and passengers are being decimated by plague and four passengers leave the ship surreptitiously. One (Claudette Colbert) did not come along willingly, as the other three (Mary Boland, William Gargan and Herbert Marshall) take her with them to keep her from alerting the crew. Soon they come to a tropical island where they are having a cholera outbreak!!! Wow...talk about lousy luck. So, the four are led through the jungle by an odd guy (Leo Carillo) in order to try to make it back to civilization. Can they make it or will be eaten by leopards, snakes or cannibals? See it for yourself....or not.

While the basic idea was good and quite original, the film had some serious problems--problems that you do often see in other DeMille films. The characters are often quite one-dimensional and stupid. The only one who came off well was Mary Boland--she was hilarious and quite entertaining. Also, the film suffered a bit from DeMille's love of adding as much nudity as he could get--something he also did in several other films of the same time ("Cleopatra" and the religious epic "Sign of the Cross"). It really didn't fit and seemed silly--especially with Colbert then wearing dresses of leaves and leopard skins (and the skins kept changing--like there was a fashion designer living in the jungle!). It's all very trivial and silly--but also entertaining on a brain-dead sort of level. Not bad...not very good either.

By the way...what is a chimp doing on an island in the Pacific?! They were off by many thousands of miles on this one.

One of Cecil B. DeMille's lesser and lesser-known efforts, Four Frightened People is a Depression era melodrama that cashes in on the public's misgivings about modern society, a culture of decadence whose values seemed as doubtful as its future. Will a forced return to untamed nature lay bare what refinement and sophistication have only hidden from view? Escaping to a remote island after the plague breaks out on the steamer that was to take them back to the US, four frightened people are about to find out. As the director himself put it in a radio trailer for the film, the titular characters are meant to "reveal just how rapidly the polite mold of civilization disintegrates under the influence of the jungle. These people shed civilization when they shed their clothes. They become like animals of the jungle, fighting and loving like the beasts who terrify them." DeMille, of course, is decidedly of that culture of decadence; and when he strips his characters, he is less interested in teaching than in teasing us.

Don't expect to see starchy Herbert Marshall drop his trousers; the cameraman reportedly had some difficulty concealing the actor's artificial leg. Claudette Colbert, however, once again obliges, as she did before in The Sign of the Cross. Here she plays Miss Jones, a timid schoolteacher who gradually tosses her inhibitions and prim getup to pursue a wilderness romance and frolic in a waterfall. To keep such titillation going, cheeky DeMille employs a chimpanzee to snatch what's left of her dress. Far from being shamed and subdued, Miss Jones learns to enjoy being lost and finding out what school and society seem to have kept from her. "Can't I have feelings as well as you?" she confronts her male companions. "Well, I can! And from now on I'm gonna let them out. If I got to be lost, I'm gonna be lost the way I want to be, and do all the things I've wanted to do before I die." Of course, when exposed to such fire, neither the self-absorbed reporter (William Gargan) nor the disillusioned and unhappily married chemist (Marshall) in her party can resist the flame.

DeMille was an expert at striptease, at unveiling his leading ladies for public display, and at packaging such lowbrow peepshows as high art. Four Frightened People does without the props of antiquity and insists instead on the film's authenticity as a nature study. "All exterior scenes in this picture were actually photographed in the strange jungles on the slopes of the Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in the South Pacific," the words on the screen are meant to assure us, even though the less than impressive cinematography will fail to convince anyone that DeMille was even half as interested in flora than in flesh.

Filmed and initially released prior to the enforcement of the production code, Four Frightened People generates some steam, however creaky the engine. Welcome sparks of comedy are added by the delightful Mary Boland, who portrays a society lady determined to educate the natives about birth control while encouraging the illicit affair of her cultured companions.

Utter balderdash with the DeMille touch, although it is missing a big set piece which in his later films was standard, has to do with people stranded on an island fending off man and beast. Somehow going through the rigors of the jungle makes Claudette more attractive rather than less, she even has an indistinct but very definite nude scene under a waterfall. Herbert Marshall is fine as usual but the real standout is Mary Boland doing her best fluttery nincompoop, the periods when she disappears from the film it really suffers because of it. A notorious flop in its day this is enjoyable if you are a fan of DeMille's excesses but he's definitely made better films.