Four Frightened People

I am relating a great deal of this film's content because I know it is nearly impossible for potential viewers to find. So if you don't want to know specifics of the plot, please stop reading! I was lucky enough to enjoy it through a university preservation film festival.

First, the four main characters are introduced:

Mary Boland - interested in reducing the birth rate of the country; Herbert Marshall - an "unimportant" rubber chemist "too quiet and shy to shake the world's foot from his neck", Claudette Colbert - an insignificant Chicago geography teacher, and William Gargan - an egotistical journalist whose articles "New York" is just waiting for. (Those are some of the film's words, not mine).

In the first few minutes, you see Colbert dressed in a very prim fashion with her hair pulled tightly back and glasses always on. This was reason enough to pay admission! The three other main characters are trying to escape from their plague-infected ship. She has screamed, so they have to abduct her in order to slip away unnoticed.

Soon their little boat dies and they must rely on a native (Leo Carillo calling himself "white") to help them find a path back to civilization. This is where their 'fun' really begins. They must traverse through an ominous jungle. Colbert only notices the pretty orchid she wants to pick and when they bunk for the night, she is incredibly offended that they expect her to sleep with them (including the men). This is when a truly bit of funny dialogue occurs: Marshall says something like, Neither one of us thinks of you as a woman so stop turning everything into a sex problem and join the group! It was very amusing to hear a proper-sounding man blurt this out angrily. She insists on being alone until she hears a lion. Then she races over on all fours and is in between the men while they're attempting to sleep. Her hair is hanging down and the impression is that she is getting prettier. The two men roll over though and ignore her.

Soon they are lost in a maze of unnavigable branches. Colbert tries to reason which way is north. No one wants to listen to her, but they're ready to play with the extra set of cards she handily has in her purse. Under a makeshift roof, they play at night while Gargan barely saves Colbert from a snake. Feeling indebted to him, she dries his wet shoes over a fire but only succeeds in burning out the soles. He is infuriated, and now she is determined to go on alone. After all, her great great grandfather was John Paul Jones.

Now a real native tribe finds the lost wanderers and will not leave them in peace unless one of the women stays with them. They choose Boland because she's heavier than Colbert and they like that. Soon the two men who never liked each other start arguing, especially over the less inhibited Colbert who now attractively wears bathing suits made from leaves and bathes luxuriously under a waterfall. She starts making the decisions much to the men's chagrin. She becomes enamoured of the more sensitive Marshall, who we learn is a hen-pecked husband. Eventually, the group survives the death of their leader and Marhsall's being hit with an arrow. Back in civilization, we see Marshall and Colbert in their separate environments. For those who like to see their characters happily paired though, this film won't disappoint you.

If you like Colbert and Marshall, this film is one to search for. It is also fun to see Boland younger and playing an unmatronly character. This is a more subdued DeMille picture which presents a different aspect of him as a director. The film may be a little silly and unrealistic, but it was not a spectacle. I wish it was available for people to see more readily.

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.

This film has long been maddeningly elusive on both home video and even television, where it would seem like a natural for AMC or TCM. It's directed by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, features a solid cast in William Gargan, Herbert Marshall and Mary Boland, and best of all lets us see the most beautiful woman to grace the screen in the 1930s, Claudette Colbert, undergo an alluring transformation from prim, mousy schoolteacher to a self-assured jungle woman in a midriff baring leopardskin.

Not that DeMille gives us a picture of the jungle as a totally idyllic Paradise. The story, which focuses on four people who have escaped a plague outbreak on their ocean liner and who are trekking through hundreds of miles of jungle to reach civilization, shows them going through many travails from snakes to ugly insects to hostile natives etc. Along the way, DeMille mixes in comic relief, intense drama and character studies, philosophical and religious musings, and a generous amount of Claudette showing off her magnificent form. In short, he gives us exactly what he also served up in his spectacle pictures, without the spectacle itself. That absence of spectacle may account for why the picture ultimately failed and is forgotten today. Too bad, because it's quite fascinating to watch.

DeMille obviously enjoyed showcasing Colbert in revealing outfits, since he would do so two more times in the next year, first in "Cleopatra" and then in "Sign Of The Cross."

"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.

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.