Four Frightened People

This relatively small-scale adventure drama from Cecil B. DeMille has its attractions: A sterling cast, lush on-location photography by Karl Struss, and an interesting plot premise: four modern Westerners forced to trek together across the jungles of Malaya when bubonic plague strikes the crew of their steamer as it "perspires" down the Malay coast. These Westerners are: Claudette Colbert as a sheltered and timid young geography teacher; Herbert Marshall as a rubber industry chemist; William Gargan as a news correspondent; and Mary Boland as the chirpy, self-confident wife of a British colonial official.

The first five minutes are an exercise in the art of the silent cinema. Each main character is introduced with a descriptive caption; further titles explain the overall situation in heightened language. In an artful sequence showing the ship's telegraph operator tapping out a call for help we see the translation of his Morse code as ghostly white words floating across the screen. We are then jolted by the sight of Claudette Colbert in close-up – bespectacled, without her trademark bangs and almost makeup-free as well – struggling to scream but prevented from doing so by Herbert Marshall's hand over her mouth. He, along with fellow Anglo passengers Gargan and Boland, are escaping the doomed ship in a lifeboat and are taking Colbert along for her own good. When the quartet discovers that the plague has also struck the natives on land they have no choice but to cross the peninsula on foot in hopes of finding a ship on the other side that will carry them home.

In stories of this kind the characters usually undergo deep transformations under the pressures of survival in the wild, revealing previously hidden dimensions and emerging as either heroes or villains, leaders or followers, corpses or survivors. Here, however, the focus is on the sexual and sartorial awakening of the Colbert character who evolves from prim and virginal wallflower in a dowdy dress to lusty and assertive tropical siren whose jungle- ravaged Western street clothes are conveniently swiped by a chimpanzee while she is bathing in a waterfall, forcing her to improvise first a sort of sarong made of jungle leaves and eventually a form-fitting leopard skin in the Tarzan-Jane style. She wears both well. In all three of the movies she made for DeMille she was dressed to kill.

There are some genuinely gripping scenes as well as comedy, chiefly from Boland who tramps through the muck in evening gown and high heels without ever entirely losing her essential fun-loving good nature. Even when she is taken prisoner by a tribe of cannibals she manages to turn their village into her private country club. It's the females who shine here, as Colbert gets a chance to show off her acting chops as well as her splendid physique and Boland gets to be Boland in an uncharacteristic setting.

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 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.

Interesting Cecil B. DeMille film about four passengers fleeing a plague-infested ship and having to fight their way through the jungle. William Gargan is a pompous reporter who's the he-man of the group, pointing his gun at everything that moves and barking orders. Mary Boland is a talkative middle-aged socialite who provides most of the movie's humor and is pretty much the highlight. Herbert Marshall is a sarcastic chemist who discovers his masculinity through the ordeal. Claudette Colbert plays a mousy geography teacher with pinned-up hair and glasses. As the film progresses, she lets her hair down, loses the glasses, and wears less clothes. So naturally she becomes increasingly sexy and self-confident! The two men, of course, start to notice her more. Leo Carillo is an English-speaking native guide who is terrible at his job and gets the group lost!

As I said, it's an interesting film for DeMille, who is known as a director of epics. This is a smaller, more character-driven story. It's a nice little film, if a slight one. Corny at times but enjoyable enough. The cast is good and the direction solid. Colbert is lovely and makes the most of a silly part. Try not to take it too seriously and I'm sure you'll enjoy it more.