FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE

 

Last month I was at Half Price Books, and I happened upon a hardcover copy of EMPIRE OF DREAMS, a biography of Cecil B. DeMille written by Scott Eyman. Reading it inspired me to pull out a DeMille DVD box set from Universal I had bought years ago, and pick out the least-known film from the set to write a blog post on: 1934's FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE. 

FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE was one of the least successful films DeMille directed for Paramount Pictures. Its story is simple--two men and two women escape from a plague-ridden tramp steamer in a lifeboat, and wind up on a Malaysian island. The group manages to get a native to guide them back to civilization, but they get even more lost as they go deeper and deeper into the jungle, dealing with one sort of dangerous situation after another, as each of their individual personalities undergoes a change. 

The four castaways are a prim Chicago geography teacher (Claudette Colbert), a dull chemist (Herbert Marshall), a brazen journalist (William Gargan), and a eccentric upper-class Englishwoman (Mary Boland). Accompanying them is the native guide (Leo Carrillo), who appears to have gotten to Malaysia by way of Mexico. 

FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE is a hard film to pin down. The above poster is very deceiving. The movie isn't a melodramatic hard-edged thriller--it has way too many lighthearted moments, and at times one gets the feeling that DeMille and his writers were sending up the whole "civilized people stuck in an uncivilized situation" genre. Most of the film was shot on location in Hawaii, and while DeMille and cinematographer Karl Struss get the most out of these settings from a visual standpoint, there's a lack of danger and excitement. 

The only one of the four characters who generate any interest is the schoolteacher, Judy Jones, played by Claudette Colbert. When we first see Colbert, she's wearing almost no makeup, she's sporting glasses, and her hair is tied back in a plain manner. You just know that a star like Colbert isn't going to stay looking like that, especially in a DeMille film, and sure enough, Judy becomes more and more alluring the deeper into the jungle she gets. Eventually she even winds up making a sarong for herself using various plants, leaves, and ferns. By the end of the film it is Judy who is the dominant personality--she's almost a Jungle Queen, becoming proficient with a bow & arrow and being able to spear fish. Judy is so taken with her newfound "life" that she doesn't even want to go back home. At one point Colbert bathes underneath a waterfall (this is a Pre-Code film, and a DeMille one at that, after all). 

Unfortunately the two mediocre leading men are not worthy of Colbert's virtues. William Gargan's world-famous journalist is a blowhard, while Herbert Marshall spends most of the movie with a hangdog look on his face. (In defense of Marshall, he had an artificial leg, so I'm sure trooping around out in the rough in Hawaii while under DeMille's domineering presence wasn't very enjoyable.) Mary Boland and Leo Carrillo are the questionable comic relief, and they are more intrusive than entertaining. (Boland gets kidnapped by a native tribe, but the chief kicks her out because she's taught the women of the village how to stand up for their rights.) 

FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE didn't make a lot of money at the box office, and it's biggest impact may have been on the rest of Cecil B. DeMille's film making career--for the rest of his life he made mammoth, epic spectaculars with easily identifiable themes. Despite the Hawaiian locations FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE is a very low-key affair, with a 78-minute running time and a lack of large-scale action. (It also has a dud firecracker of an ending.) The movie is more of a curiosity, a sore thumb on the highlight list of Cecil B. DeMille.