Four Frightened People (1934) User Reviews

She's Lost—and Loving It!

[broadcastellan · 6/10 · 31 January 2006]

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.

"Shut up! You're beautiful!"

[utgard14 · 7/10 · 21 February 2014]

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.

Out there even for DeMille

[jjnxn-1 · 5/10 · 16 May 2013]

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.

Claudette Colbert In Leopardskin!

[Eric-62-2 · 4 October 2003]

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."

Quite a departure for DeMille in many ways.....

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 13 November 2012]

"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.

Campy jungle melodrama filled with a lot of things that made pre-code fun.

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 20 June 2012]

This film must have either been greatly edited or quickly disappeared right after the Hays code came in to play a huge part in movie making. There's enough sexual innuendo that would have made Mae West give star Claudette Colbert thumbs up for the bawdiness of this plot of a plain jane who simply has to shed her glasses and get wet underneath a waterfall to suddenly become desirable. She is one of four people who escape from a ship overrun with Bubonic Plague although the other lady (eccentric Mary Boland) is soon carted away by friendly natives of the South Pacific without cause for concern by the three others. Shots of a small monkey being swallowed by a Venus fly trap and various other creatures seem straight out of a 30's Frank Buck movie. Claudette is rightly horrified by the shot of the monkey, but it is the shot which begins to awaken her feelings of being alive. Once fellow passenger Herbert Marshall comes across her taking a shower in the buff under the waterfall, his feelings awaken for her, and there is no turning back to the plain girl she was before.

A story like this can't help but be entertaining even if preposterous. As usual, director Cecil proves his movies are not the ordinary run of DeMille. Colbert, seen as Cleopatra in another DeMille movie the same year (as well as having been in his 1932 epic "Sign of the Cross") makes an unconvincing non-beauty even with spectacles and no makeup. It is ironic that once she takes that waterfall shower, suddenly her face is fully glowing as if she had just visited Elizabeth Arden in a nearby native village. Boland adds some humor, but Marshall and William Gargan are rather bland. The final shot of Colbert back in civilization is a real eye raiser, especially if you happen to be in the teaching profession.

Good Early Survival Thriller

[TheExpatriate700 · 6/10 · 15 January 2012]

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.

good ingredients, fair result

[mukava991 · 5/10 · 12 May 2009]

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.

engaging performers make it worthwhile

[ecaulfield · 8/10 · 21 December 2000]

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.

Goofy, campy jungle adventure courtesy of Cecil B. DeMille

[zetes · 7/10 · 29 May 2006]

It is included in Universal's five-disc DeMille set and is the least well known of the films, mostly because it's not an epic, the genre to which DeMille usually contributed. Claudette Colbert stars, and is, as usual, wonderful. She plays a mousy, virginal school teacher who eventually transforms into a jungle princess. Mary Boland, Herbert Marshall and William Gargan round out the cast, along with Leo Carrillo as a native who claims he is accepted as a white man because of his necktie. The film is racist as hell (at one point the men shoot a native because they think he is a chimp who stole their rifle), but I tend to expect that with these kinds of movies. It's about the same as a Tarzan movie. There's some good comedy, and Colbert strips down pretty naked. The film was cut upon re-release because of its sexual content (the version available is missing 17 minutes, at least according to IMDb). Either the missing footage is lost or Universal was too lazy to find and restore it.

DeMille Goes Hawaiian

[bkoganbing · 4/10 · 19 February 2011]

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.

Superb: a pre-Code "Carry On Up the Jungle"

[istara · 10/10 · 17 March 2017]

One of the funniest films I have ever seen. Truly laugh-a-minute, and an absolute must-see for Herbert Marshall fans. For anyone confused by genre, this is clearly supposed to be a comedy, with a dash of adventure, sex and melodrama.

The costumes. These are exquisite. The cast spend a couple of days tottering around the jungle in full 1930s evening dress, diamonds dripping from each earlobe in the case of Mary Boland. Overnight, everyone's clothes become entirely shredded into the neat, ribbon-like tatters that you'd get if you cut up your kid's t-shirt with scissors for a pirate costume. Then Claudette Colbert goes naked in the shower, and the men gaze on as a monkey nicks her clothes. She spends the next two days in various couture garments fashioned from leaves. Finally she transitions to her leopard-skin phase which involves several more perfectly tailored fur garments, culminating in a leopard-skin crop top.

The make up. It's wonderful. They seem to wear more as the film progresses. Wiliam Gargan's eyeliner is a sight to behold (see about 58 minutes in). Claudette Colbert pops on some lipstick after her waterfall-shower, and pouts coyly at herself in a hand mirror. Mary Boland dabs on night cream before the first group camping session. The two men have a shaving and grooming scene, where Herbert Marshall attempts to style his hair with a spectacularly incompetent looking comb made of twigs or something. No idea what he uses for Brylcreem - coconut oil? Both men are 100% smooth and clean-shaven throughout the entire expedition (which lasts weeks if not months), apparently getting by on one shared razor blade.

The dog(s). Mary Boland's lapdog probably deserves a leading credit of its own. There's barely a single moment where it's not tucked under her arm, looking utterly disinterested in everything going on around it. It's so docile I wondered several times if it was stuffed, but if you watch it closely enough you'll see its head move. At about 69 minutes (in the version I saw) she tosses it from one arm to the other, and it still doesn't flinch. It's possibly a different dog in the final scene, its muzzle looks darker.

Herbert Marshall. He spends most of the film with a lock of hair carefully styled over his brow, much like the storm- swept scene in the lodge in Girls' Dormitory (1936). This film is full of Colin Firth-style "Darcy moments" for Marshall. His costume progressively decreases in quantity until he's essentially topless in the final scenes. He actually comes out with the line: "Breakfast, woman!" (which is supposed to be funny, and fortunately is, on several levels). Interestingly, his accent is less conspicuously "cut glass" British RP in this movie, compared to many of his later ones. In the final scenes where he's back to brilliantined immaculacy, I couldn't initially work out which actress was his wife and which was his mother-in-law. The actresses only have eight years between them and they're both older than him, and made to look about twenty years older.

Claudette Colbert. Her glasses. The problem with the "plain Jane shedding her specs" makeover is that it does beg the question how the lady's eyesight miraculously improves. Was Linda Carter wearing plain glass spectacles, or was she granted 20:20 vision on becoming Wonderwoman? Here, happily, we are treated to an explanation: "I didn't know I could see without glasses. They told me I had to wear them when I was little, and I just did." Really? You never in your life before took them off to sleep or shower, and noticed whether you could see or not? Wonderful stuff. Her histrionic marriage vows to Marshall, while he's (supposedly) dying of an arrow wound and they're both trussed up back to back on a bamboo pole, are marvellous.

Mary Boland. She transforms a native village into the British Raj. She gets an absolute treat of a line early on, just as her gown is starting to disintegrate: "You didn't mention me in connection with our sleeping arrangement. But I suppose the assurances you gave Miss Jones apply to me too?" Followed by obvious disappointment when Marshall confirms with a grunt that they do.

William Gargan. I imagine his character sheet had one direction on it: "brash". His self-importance might seem off the scale, but I've met modern-day journalists with equivalent egos. Unless I missed it, there's no record of what he ends up doing after they all return to civilisation, unlike for the other characters.

Leo Carillo. The death of his "native guide" character is almost tragic, except for the fact he manages to deliver a couple more lines with perfect clarity - with an arrow stuck through his neck and coming out the other side - returning the scene to hilarity. Only heightened by his final stroke of his MCC tie before carking it.

To sum up: this is a brilliant film and a must-see for fans of vintage cinema. It's worth buying on DVD if you can't catch a showing on TV or online.

Fun in the Sun with Cecil B. and a Skinny-Dipping Claudette

[oldblackandwhite · 7/10 · 2 November 2010]

When you hook up with a Cecil B. DeMille movie, you can usually count on it being big, splashy, historically-inaccurate, gaudy, strange, and tremendous fun. Four Frightened People, however, was not the usual Cecil B. movie. It wasn't big. The usual cast of thousands is missing, most of the screen time showing only the five principal players with infrequent intrusions of a few dozen menacing South Sea natives. It is actually one of his smaller pictures. And it isn't very splashy, unless you count Claudette Colbert's gorgeous body nude under a waterfall. Okay, that's splashy enough to satisfy most men, yours truly included. Historical inaccuracy is not a factor, since this is one of his few movies set in modern times. Gaudy? Well, the leopard skin outfits could qualify in a minor way. Strange? Oh yes, it's still a Cecil B. DeMille movie. Fun? One of the master of big screen entertainment's most fun movies!

The plot: four civilized people castaway on a primitive coast gradually reverting to the primitive state before they can get back to civilization. DeMille had previously explored this theme with Male and Female, a 1919 silent. But whereas Male and Female was a more-or-less serious examination of the subject, Four Frightened People plays mostly for laughs. And there are lots of them. This must be Cecil B.'s funniest movie.

The plot is not particularly important anyway. This is one of those movies where you gather together a talented cast of players and let them do what they do best. Stunningly beautiful Claudette Colbert, classy Herbert Marshall, madcap Mary Boland, he-man William Gargan, and funny, exotic Leo Carrillo were at the top of their considerable powers in this one. It's a delight to watch them!

What you can always count on from Cecil B. DeMille -- top-flight entertainment.

Undermined By Silliness

[ferbs54 · 5/10 · 27 May 2011]

1934 was a big, important year for rising Hollywood star Claudette Colbert. She appeared in four pictures that year--"Four Frightened People," directed by Cecil B. de Mille (her second picture for him, after 1932's "The Sign of the Cross"); "It Happened One Night," for which she won her only Oscar; "Cleopatra," also by de Mille; and "Imitation of Life," which many of us still prefer to the 1959 Lana Turner remake. Of this quartet, the film in question, "Four Frightened People," is easily the weakest, but still manages to entertain.

The picture begins promisingly enough, and indeed wastes scant time in introducing us to the frightened four of the title. In a lifeboat, escaping from a plague-stricken tramp steamer off the Malay coast, we meet Stewart Corder, a he-man newspaper columnist (William Gargan); Arnold Ainger, a downtrodden rubber chemist (Herbert Marshall); the flibbertigibbet, chatty wife of a British official, Fifi Mardick (her purpose in the Far East being to foster birth control among the natives, and played by Mary Boland); and an incredibly mousy, bespectacled schoolteacher from Chicago, Judy Jones (our Claudette). Once on shore, the four, along with pidgin-talking guide Montague (Leo Carrillo), trek through the virgin jungle, during which time they encounter wildlife of all sorts: water buffalo, cobra, centipede, several tribes of nasty natives...and Judy herself, who, once the glasses come off and the hair comes down, morphs into some kind of nature goddess/Sheena of the Jungle type of knockout!

"Four Frightened People," sadly enough, though it admittedly might sound smashing in synopsis, is something of a failed picture, despite its many merits. The film has been nicely shot and features gorgeous-looking B&W photography by Karl Struss. The outdoor locales were "photographed in the strange jungles on the slopes of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in the South Pacific," and they DO look mighty impressive. The acting by one and all, especially Claudette, is first rate, and de Mille's direction is sturdy as always. So what's the problem? Well, the picture is waaaaay too light in tone, verging at times on the silly, even the ridiculous. This could have been a tremendous action film, or a study of disparate types under stress, but no. Instances of silliness include Corder and Ainger trekking through the tropical jungle wearing white formal dinner jackets; the fact that Judy never realized before that she doesn't need glasses to see; the seemingly inevitable monkey shenanigans; and Fifi's domination of the jungle tribe. (I would like to think that the film's source novel, by somebody named E. Arnot Robinson, was a bit more serious in tone.) And how could these men possibly not see past Judy Jones' eyeglasses and hair bun to discern what an incredible looker she is?!?!?! It would take a LOT more than mere dowdiness to disguise Claudette's beautiful face, which indeed stayed with her all her life, till her death at 92. Judy's transformation into a child of the forest is not half as incredible as this failure on the part of these two supposed men of the world! Anyway, these bits of silliness seriously undermine an otherwise entertaining film, which might have been a bit edgier had it been made a few years earlier, during the pre-Code era. Still, it affords us the invaluable opportunity to witness Claudette Colbert bathing nude under a waterfall, and I suppose that IS something....

Major Disappointment

[Michael_Elliott · 3 February 2009]

Four Frightened People (1934)

** (out of 4)

Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, Mary Boland and William Gargan play the characters that the title refers to. The four escape a plague ridden boat only to wind up in the jungle where they must try to escape while battling not only each other but other items like wild animals and a lack of water. From what I've read this film was laughed off the screen in 1934 and it certainly doesn't fair much better when viewed today. I watched the edited 78-minute version, which I must say was the longest 78-minute movie I had ever seen. I couldn't wait for this thing to end so I'm really not sure I'd want to venture into the longer cut, which is apparently fifteen-minutes longer. I'm not sure where to start with this thing but it really seems like DeMille wanted some sort of epic but couldn't reach that goal. The film is quite a mess because I was never quite sure what was going on or why certain characters were acting the way they were. What really took me out of the film were the four characters who are all rather unlikeable so I had a hard time caring about which one lived or died. Even worse were some of the performances, which were quite bad and this includes Marshall. He's shouting is so over the top that I quickly grew tired of him and the character. Boland plays an annoying character and probably delivers the best performance as she is very annoying. Colbert is so hit-and-miss that it's hard to take her character too serious. Being one of the last pre-code films to be released, the movie does take on some sexuality with the most famous sequence being Colbert's semi-nude shower. It's funny how the film starts off showing her with too much clothes but then slowly taking them off to the nude scene, which then has her running around in leopard skin for the rest of the film. Another problem is that the film doesn't know if it wants to be an action/adventure type or a comedy because the thing is all over the map. With that said, the film does look incredibly good and realistic and features a rather nail-biting sequence with a cobra, which will probably make several viewers jump out of their seats. In the end this film comes off as a major disappointment considering the director and cast but the most shocking thing is how boring the movie is.

When Sigmund Freud dreamed about Tarzan

[1930s_Time_Machine · 7/10 · 3 October 2023]

Yes I know it's a Cecil B deMille film but it's actually really good - honestly. It's not one of his awful sex and sandals epics, this one's set in 'modern' times with real people in a real story and it's really enjoyable.

The name Cecil B deMille on a film is usually a synonym for: 'avoid this - contains self-indulgent spectacle with actors having raided the dressing up box overacting in the most silent movie style imaginable.' Forget your preconceptions - the so-called (self-styled) greatest director in the world could actually direct..... actually direct well! With this he gives us an intelligent, grown-up drama that's quite deep and thoughtful yet never too heavy and it's anything but dull.

That an African Chimpanzee is living in Malaya is not a mistake. It's there for the totally laudable reason: it needs to be there to steal Claudette Colbert's clothes - it was necessary in TARZAN AND HIS MATE and it's necessary here so no more discussion needed!

Claudette Colbert is fantastic in this. Her character is a bit cliched: mousy school ma'am takes off her glasses, shakes loose her hair and voila - a beautiful, sexy lady! Being the superb actress she was however she makes what could have been a shallow role into a very authentic and believable person.

She's not the only star in this. Her four other co-stars are all equally as real and easy to engage with. Lost in the jungle, believing that each minute they are there might be their last minute alive changes or rather develops their characters preluding Lord of the Flies by twenty years. We have the cocky journalist, the stuffy middle-aged woman, the Anglophile Malaysian guide and the meek, mild-mannered middle manager - they're all transformed by the jungle into their true selves. The jungle wipes away the pretences and masks which society had imposed upon them. Some of them become the person they've always dreamed of being, some become the person they've been hiding from for years.

I'm reading what I'm writing and thinking that you're not believing me.? You think this sounds like cliched nonsense written by a precious schoolboy with an obsession of seeing Claudette Colbert in a leopard skin bikini. You'll just have to watch it for yourself. It's fabulous, it's fun, it's emotional, it's brilliantly acted....and Claudette Colbert is in a leopard skin bikini!

Serviceable jungle adventure

[gridoon2024 · 6/10 · 4 January 2018]

Claudette Colbert's transformation from a homely schoolteacher to an assertive jungle queen is amazing (and as much a credit to her as an actress as to the makeup & styling departments). The location filming is also commendable. But Colbert's romance with Herbert Marshall is not convincing - although a title card at the beginning informs us that his character is "sensitive and shy", he is actually about as outspoken and rude to Colbert in the first half of the movie as William "peacock" Gargan is. Mary Boland adds some amusing moments. **1/2 out of 4.

FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE {Edited Re-Release Version} (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934) **1/2

[Bunuel1976 · 6/10 · 29 January 2009]

Good-looking but rather disappointing film for a DeMille in exotic vein although, to be fair, the version I watched was pared down from the original 95 minutes to 78. Still, a few Pre-Code touches remain (notably Claudette Colbert's nude bathing scene), along with the standard action of jungle adventure fare and a genuinely cringe-inducing encounter with a cobra. Handling is typically stilted for a product from the early Talkie era, and the cast interesting yet variable: Colbert, initially dowdy as a geography teacher(!) but gradually "blossoming" into womanhood to the initial consternation – and eventual rivalry – of rugged newspaperman William Gargan and middle-aged but essentially decent Herbert Marshall (stifled by his high-society marriage). The last member of the titular group is Mary Boland in an unlikely role as an expert on indigenous culture, and also on hand is Leo Carrillo as an affable native guide. Incidentally, this is one of a handful of films by the larger-than-life director I'll be watching in order to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death (which actually fell on January 21st).

"A fella can't just give in to nature"

[Steffi_P · 4/10 · 21 June 2009]

From the 1920s onwards, virtually every Cecil B. DeMille picture treads a fine line between the spectacular and the ridiculous. Usually this doesn't matter because DeMille was, if nothing else, a master at making style compensate for lack of substance. But by the 1930s the line had become particularly fine, thanks to his hiring some of the most inept screenwriters of the era. The guilty parties here are Lenore J. Coffee and Bartlett Cormack, this time churning out an exotic romantic drama in a similar vein to Red Dust and Bird of Paradise.

Although factual accuracy and plausibility tended to be limited resources in DeMille-land, he always insisted on authenticity of locations, costumes and so forth. Hence Four Frightened People is filmed in mountains and jungles of Hawaii, and this prevents it suffering from the studio-bound look of many contemporary "outdoor" pictures. The renowned Karl Struss' photographs the forest effectively with plenty of contrast, and DeMille frames the protagonists (with his usual distant objectivity) surrounded by overhanging leaves, making the most of the dense undergrowth.

Unfortunately this is as far as DeMille goes with credibility, and among the less kosher sights are a rubbery-looking cobra, a ferret being eaten by a plant and Leo Carillo as a buffoonish tie-wearing native guide. This being DeMille, and it being the early 30s, there is also a touch of gratuitous nudity. While Colbert takes a shower under a waterfall, her clothes are conveniently stolen by a cheeky ape (a long way from its native Africa – perhaps it escaped from a zoo?) forcing her to spend the rest of the picture in a Raquel Welch-style fur bikini.

The eponymous Four are one-note stereotypes, their dialogue trite and their relationships boring. The actors turn in appropriately uninspiring performances. Claudette Colbert was at her best when playing sassy, assertive women; she can make nothing out of the dowdy caricature she is given here, and even when she is made-over she doesn't really get a chance to shine. William Gargan snarls his way through his part, managing to make his character even weaker on screen than it is on paper. The best I can say of Mary Boland is that she is at least suited to her role. The one stand-out is Herbert Marshall, a fantastic yet largely forgotten actor, kind of like a more human George Sanders. His world-weary delivery gives some depth and likability to his character that is absent in the leaden script.

This picture bears a fair few similarities to Male and Female which DeMille made in 1919. Quality-wise however they are poles apart (I regard Male and Female as possibly his greatest picture ever, and Four Frightened People is among his worst), and the difference is because DeMille seems to have forgotten how to do drama. Take away the spectacle, and all you have left is daftness. The only spectacles here are the ones worn by Colbert, and even the exotic location can't breathe any life into the paper-thin plot. Interestingly, DeMille himself acknowledged this as a failure, and in what was effectively a public apology announced to moviegoers that from now on he would make nothing but epics. If it weren't for his commercial sensibilities, he might just have sunk without trace.

DeMille's Last 'Modest' Film Before His Epics

[springfieldrental · 8/10 · 26 February 2023]

After his 1932 historic epic "The Sign of the Cross," Cecil B. DeMille reverted back to more contemporary, domestic films he was known to have directed during his silent movie days. The first, 1933's "This Day and Age," a coming-of-age film about high schoolers, was a disappointment with the public. He decided for his next motion picture to showcase an exotic backdrop, traveling to Hawaii to film January 1934 "Four Frightened People." The DeMille picture focused on four passengers who escape a diseased-ridden freighter to a nearby jungle terra firma on a lifeboat.

"Four Frightened People," based on a 1931 E. Arnot Robertson novel of the same name, is a "Heart of Darkness" kind of tale where the four are forced to travel on foot several days in the thick jungle in search of civilization. Librarian Judy Jones (Claudette Colbert) is a frail bookworm who is about to crack from under the stress of the wilds when a chimpanzee inadvertently turns her life around. In one of DeMille's more famous scenes, Judy takes a shower underneath a waterfall. The chimp stumbles upon her pile of clothes and takes them. The two men in the group searching for her, Arnold Ainger (Herbert Marshall) and Steward Corder (William Gargan), happen to see her, and they go ga-ga. Walking in her birthday suit, as reviewer Ace Black points out, the librarian is transformed "from docile and helpless to confident and alluring, allowing Judy the freedom to find the lioness within." The filming on the Big Island of Hawaii was a dicey affair, as all jungle film productions were back then. Claudette Colbert appendicitis flared up just before she left for the Pacific island and was hospitalized. The actress appears thinner than normal early in the film. Beside her sickness delaying the production, other factors caused DeMille fits, including a mechanical cobra breaking down, a noisy camera making it difficult for the audio technician, and actress Mary Boland, 41, playing the fourth member of the quartet as Mrs. Mardick, proved difficult to handle.

Paramount Pictures, as was becoming a custom in Hollywood before the premier of a movie, held an unannounced preview of "Four Frightened People" before an unsuspecting audience. Trouble was the spectators were waiting to see "Ace of Aces," and most of the viewers were kids. After receiving the audience's survey reactions, DeMille surprisingly agreed with the viewers, who said more was needed to be said about each of the four characters, and cut the movie by 17 minutes. The director then front-ended his movie by adding a biography of each of the four main characters and pared down the film's length.

Although "Four Frightened People" was hailed as a praiseworthy film by the critics, the public failed to line up at the theaters' box offices. DeMille realized then and there his forte was to direct large-scale spectaculars. This jungle movie was the last modest film the director was involved in for the remainder of his Hollywood career.

Dowdy spinster schoolteacher transforms into passionate jungle girl.

[weezeralfalfa · 7/10 · 28 July 2017]

I watched the abbreviated 78 min. version of this farcical adventure film, rather than the 95 min. version. I'm a sucker for most any film with Claudette Colbert a leading player. Here, she transforms from a dowdy bespectacled schoolteacher into a sensuous South Seas maiden, with long flowing hair, highlighted by a couple of flowers, wearing a leopard-skin outfit(where did she get that in the jungle?)Wow! Worth viewing for that alone. When she returns from her adventure, she's somewhere in between in the class room, looking like the classic Claudette. Supposedly, the two men and two women were on a pleasure ship, just departed from Malaysia. Very shortly thereafter, a bubonic plague epidemic broke out. The 4 steal a life boat before it gets worse, and land on a shore filled with fierce-looking natives, but led by the English-speaking Montague(Leo Carillo), who calms the situation. He says not practical to return to 'civilization' by small boat, so he will guide them through the dense jungle for some days.

The 4 refugees are composed of 2 shy ones: Claudette and Herbert Marshall, as Arnold, and two confident gregarious extroverts in matronly society lady Mrs. Mardick(Mary Boland) and newspaper reporter Stewart(William Gargan). Gradually, as Claudette literally lets her hair down and gains confidence, the 2 introverts begin to fall in love, even though Arnold is unhappily married to a society matron(This will be fixed near the end).

During their trip, besides the unpredictable natives, they encounter various scary features of the jungle. Shrub limbs are so thick near the ground that they have difficulty making their way through the jungle(Surely, the natives already had decent trails!). At one point, they are trying to navigate between closely spaced bamboo 'trees'. Australian kookaburras fill the forest with their raucous calls, heard in nearly every jungle treck film of this era. An African Chimpanzee steals Claudette's clothes while she is bathing under a waterfall. Eventually, most are retrieved while Claudette is wearing an elephant leaf skirt and bikini. A water buffalo scares them, though they don't encounter any crocodiles. The roar of a lion, and falling coconuts unsettle them, as does a scary-looking centipede. An inquisitive cobra is killed with a pistol shot.

Along the way, Mary Roland helps diffuse the tension with her lubricious comments. She tries to convince the natives that birth control is good for them. The women are more favorably impressed than the men. Speaking of the natives, they are identified as Semang or Sakai, which is the actual name of some Negrito native tribes in Malaysia. I'm impressed.

Outdoors shooting takes place mostly on the slopes of the two highest volcanoes of Hawaii Island. Unlike the written statement that these are located in the South Seas, the island of Hawaii is located at 21 degrees North latitude, farther north than Jamaica. Also, the coast of Malaysia, where the action supposedly takes place, is in SE Asia, not the Pacific South Seas. I'm sure most viewers don't care about such fine geographical points.

The cast could have used a good male comedian to complement Mary Roland(I'm thinking of Bob Hope, as in "Road to Singapore"). It also would have been nice if several musical numbers had been included, as was the case in some subsequent films with a rather similar plot.

Producer and director Cecil DeMille's next project: "Cleopatra" also starred Claudette. Of course, it was much more popular than the present film. In fact, this film was the only one of her 4 films for 1934 that wasn't nominated for Best Film Academy Award!

See it at YouTube.

Jungle intrigue

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 28 July 2021]

Arnold Ainger (Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg during World War I yet became one of the biggest leading men of Hollywood; he was also the star of the radio drama The Man Called X), Mrs. Mardick (Mary Boland, The Women), Stewart Corder (William Gargan, who played radio and TV detective Martin Kane) and Judy Jones (Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night) have escaped their bubonic plague-infested ship and ended up on a jungle island populated with primitive natives and wild beasts.

The print ad for this had great copy: "Once...ladies and gentleman...the last remnants of civilization slipped from them with their tattered clothes...Now they were male and female battling the jungle for life...each other for love!"

This is a movie that doesn't get mentioned in the films of Cecil B. DeMille all that often. This movie looks great, despite being shot on location in Hawaii. Also, while Colbert used a stand-in wearing a flesh-colored bodysuit for the waterfall scene, she was nearly nude in other moments. This was, of course, before the Hayes Code.

"The Crusades" coming on DVD

[adv_regs · 9/10 · 17 May 2006]

This film is coming on DVD on 23 May 2006 as part of a Cecil B De Mille collection; the other film in the collection are four films are "Cleopatra", "Four Frightened People", "The Sign of the Cross" and "Union Pacific". I've only seen "The Crusades" and "Cleopatra", but these two are worth the cost of the whole bundle.

"The Crusades" with all its flaws is infinitely better than the latest film on the Crusades, "The Kingdom of Heaven". It's splendid without being over the top, the story is coherent although it's typical Hollywoodization of history, and - rarely for De Mille's films - the actors don't overplay their roles.

Run Through the Jungle....

[bsmith5552 · 5/10 · 23 December 2014]

"Four Frightened People" was one of Director Cecil B. DeMille's lesser efforts of the 30s a decade that gave us the epic films "The Sign of the Cross" (1932), "Cleopatra" (1934), "The Crusades" (1935) and "Union Pacific" (1939). I didn't like it. It appears to have been an effort by DeMille to display the many talents of his favorite 30s star Claudette Colbert.

It starts out OK with four strangers escaping from a plague infested ship to safety aboard a hi-jacked fishing boat. The four, a prim be-speckled school teacher Judy Jones (Colbert) a Casper Milquetoast husband Arnold Ainger (Herbert Marshall) on his way home, a socialite Mrs. Mordick (Mary Boland) complete with dog in hand and brash braggart reporter Stewart Corder (William Gargan) are forced together in order to survive.

Arriving at an island, the four find that they will have to "run through the jungle" in order to reach safety. They secure the services of an "Englishman", Montague (Leo Carillo) to guide them. As they proceed, they encounter the usual assortment of bugs, snakes, natives et al in their quest. Through it all they manage to get lost and are forced through necessity to reveal their true personalities.

This is where DeMille gets to glamorize Ms. Colbert by having her wear a revealing leopard skin (they are in Malaysia by the way) and ridding her of the old maid glasses and hair-do. Since this was just before the introduction of the Production Code, DeMille was able to include a scene where Colbert (or a body double) is taking a shower sans clothes under a waterfall. DeMille was very good at this sort of thing. He lets the viewer think he is seeing something where in fact he sees nothing.

The character played by Boland is totally ludicrous. She carries her little dog through the trek and even gets to start up a women's lib movement among a tribe of natives. Marshall is just too stuffy to be a convincing lover for Colbert and Gargan's character is just too full of himself for my liking.

DeMille would make better use of Ms. Colbert's talents the same year in his epic "Cleopatra".

Incredibly unknown - and even more engaging!

[BeautyLiesInTheI · 11 June 2008]

This bizarre, hideously ignored Cecil B. Demille comedy has a bit of everything! Sarcastic/ironic humor, adventurous action, sex, melodrama, romance and camp shift in and out of focus, giving way to each other throughout.

Without going into much plot detail, four passengers (Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, Mary Boland and William Gargan) escape a plagued ship and come ashore only to find they must travel through miles and miles of jungle area in order to reach help. Gargan turns in a memorable performance as a determined journalist just dying to re-reach civilization to share the latest, greatest news story. Marshall and Boland are equally adept. However, this picture ultimately belongs to Demille's unique directional touches and the dynamic, versatile skill of Colbert. Fans of films fitting this description will likely find 'Four Frightened People' to be a delightful, forgotten treasure.