The next time you hear that they don't make movies like they used to, just remember that one of the movies they used to make was Four Frightened People (1934). A torrid jungle adventure which cuts its kookaburras and racism with feminism and farce, it uses an outbreak of plague to jumpstart its ambling plot and stages its happy ending against a recital of the chief exports of the Federated Malay States. I wouldn't call it the last of the red-hot pre-Codes, but it does have a naked waterfall scene. You do you, Cecil B. DeMille.
Given the main attraction of the jungle as played by the volcanic slopes of Hawaiʻi, I respect the efficiency with which the film disposes of such trivialities as set-up, establishing its scenario and even its characters with intertitles, silent-style. "A celebrated newspaper correspondent and radio headliner to whom civilization has given everything" is William Gargan's Stewart Corder, looking every inch the adventurer of the airwaves in his white dinner jacket and pith helmet. "The wife of a British Official in Malaya, who, through her club activities, bends civilization to her objective—this season it's fewer babies" describes Mary Boland's Mrs. Mardick, cradling her Pekinese to her matronly shoulder in some alarm. Herbert Marshall's Arnold Ainger is the "unimportant rubber chemist, too sensitive and shy to shake Life's foot from his neck," glancing warily upward from his just-lit pipe. "And a Chicago schoolteacher, too unimportant even for Life to notice" rounds out the quartet with Claudette Colbert's Judy Jones, nervously patting her tightly pinned hair as she blinks hopefully through her pop-eyed spectacles. A near-montage of bodies sewn up in sailcloth and a sweating radio officer cabling in extremis to Singapore slingshots the audience through the premise of a tramp steamer stricken with plague off the coast of Malaya and into the medias res of a commandeered bumboat aboard which two out of three ship-jumpers are not exactly apologizing for kidnapping the fourth, who stumbled onto their getaway while stargazing: "You don't imagine we wanted to take you, I hope?" Out of the frying pan of one pandemic into another, they come ashore to cholera-fires and the news that the coast is impassable; the only route back to civilization or at least the next freighter to New York lies overland. Under the native guidance of Leo Carillo's Montague, they set out through the lianas and the orchids and the mangroves and the water buffalo and quicker than you can say "Robinson Crusoe," the foursome find their received images of themselves tattering and falling away faster than their picturesquely unsuitable formal clothes. Some blossom, some wilt, some become the finest tailors of leopardskin this side of the Flintstones. On the level of sheer id, it is inspiring how interdependently this film achieves emotional acuity and trashiness. On the levels that deal more in narrative logic, pacing, and not embarrassing the viewer, it's a bit more of a toss-up.
The romance is wonderful. I am an all-day sucker for people growing into themselves and Four Frightened People affords a splendid double example with Colbert and Marshall, initially cast so successfully against type that the audience might hesitate to be stuck in a train compartment with either one of them, much less tramp through a tropical swamp. "Girls like her chaperone themselves," Corder says carelessly of Judy, "—smack into the old maids' home!" Even on the short acquaintance of an opening scene, we can recognize this dismissal as unkind and unfair to a badly frightened wallflower who took the first chance of her life and didn't expect it to turn into Survivor: Malaya, but refuting it won't be as simple as ditching her glasses or shaking out her hair. Her prim, gauche, spinsterly style is merely the outward show of an insecurity so vast and tremulous that she can hardly get a word out in her little paper screw of a voice that isn't apologizing for the imposition; her moments of delight are pathetically childlike, her overtures of geography or gratitude so timidly offered that they all but demand to be rebuffed. It's the kind of trite, dreary, self-fulfilling prophecy of nonentity that realistically afflicts a poor relation raised in the constant consciousness of her burden and it's infuriating. You want to shake a spine into her. It would be like yelling at Jell-O. But at least she might quiver; a look of irritated apathy is the best you'd get out of Ainger, a defeated man masking his self-loathing with a wearily facetious sarcasm that isn't funny enough to justify its relentless pessimism, the passive-aggressive self-deprecation that snipes at anyone incautious enough to show him friendliness or even civility. "No, it isn't very," he shuts down the first and only interest shown his research. "You just smell. Your clothes, I mean. Of chemicals, all the time." It's a marvelously saturnine turn and he may be cordially invited to take a flying leap at a rolling mango—it's one thing when his acid little asides are aimed at the brash journalist always boasting about his dangerous assignments, another when they wound the already downtrodden Judy. Apologizing even weakly for an uncalled-for gibe is one of the first signs of his better nature, just as reproaching him for it is one of hers, but no sparks fly between them until Judy in the wake of a devastating close shave comprehensively and cathartically loses her temper with the men she hardly dared to contradict a night ago. "Oh, stop it!" she flares, shocking their squabbling into silence. "You're like two little boys who've been kept in at recess. I'm disgusted with both of you . . . If I've got to be lost, I'm going to be lost the way I want to be—and do all the things I've wanted to do before I die!" Her long-deferred eruption doesn't spare Corder's chest-beating or Ainger's dyspepsia, concluding with withering finality, "You're a couple of sulky, irascible, egotistical, selfish—men! Montague, cut them loose and then follow me." She stalks off without waiting for a reply from her stunned audience, the field in which she grows her fucks reduced to scorched earth. Her hair streams over her bare shoulders, the journalist's gun—knocked out of his hand at the start of the fight—safe in her purse. Corder fumfuhs something patriarchal and Ainger looks like he's in love. How typically, elegantly pre-Code for a woman's strength to bring out the romance in a man. Where the increasingly threatened journalist tries to reassert his machismo with a forceful kiss that lands like a damp haddock, the chemist softens without self-consciousness, finally opening up in a beautifully bittersweet scene that at once admits his love and assumes its impossibility. Judy's spear-fishing by night, Ainger's literally carrying a torch for her, all the more poignantly because his evocative description of shrinking to fit the world's expectations which draws such wry, sympathetic recognition from her ends with the confession of his marriage. Six months from the film's release, their mutual attraction would be confined to the contrafactual or the tragic. Shooting in the fall of 1933, not only are the lovers permitted to pledge themselves with transcendent adultery to one another using the form of the Christian marriage service while bound back-to-back in a bamboo forest—I don't know whose id this scene represents, but Ainger is even wounded and half delirious, clinging to the lifeline of their love—but Judy can turn her hunter's bow on the person who threatens to smash their paradise: "I'll keep you quiet! Do you think I'm going to give up the only thing I've ever had?" By then we have seen her bringing home what looks for all the world like a great argus for Ainger to fix for breakfast, a Tarzan-Jane reversal played so comfortably that it doesn't even suggest a topsy-turvy of the decivilized world. Judy has chosen a man whose tenderness and competence match her own and the film cherishes it, however it manifests. She looks smashing in her two-piece leopardskin, too, and shirtless he's not bad at all.
The best of Four Frightened People involves this kind of exploration of how people behave when released from their accustomed lives. From his insistent self-aggrandizing, we may suspect almost at once that Corder isn't quite the steel-nerved he-man of his columns and broadcasts, but it's still eye-opening to witness him call a hurried retreat from a river at the splash of a falling coconut or reach for his gun in any situation that spooks him whether it's really dangerous or not. "Out there," Ainger correctly diagnoses, "everything told Stewart Corder how big he was. Headlines, radios, his name in type. Without that here, he shrinks!" and knows it, blustering louder to cover for his deafening irrelevance. He doesn't even speak Malay; that vital skill is surprisingly reserved for Mrs. Mardick, whose first impressions of middle-aged flightiness are revealed to be not so much inaccurate as irrelevant, as she meets the rainforest with redoubtable composure without ever ceasing to coo over her toy dog or mischievously encourage what she imagines to be romances between her younger companions. Held for a ransom of rice by a village of Semang, within the month she has formed an alliance with the local women and introduced the concepts of both Lysistrata and Planned Parenthood to the point where I am left slightly wondering how much of Margaret Sanger is in her DNA. It's a charming, topical cutaway from the main plot and it points not so incidentally toward one of the problems of the film. One run-in with a group of inimical natives may be regarded as a misfortune. Three in a row looks like carelessness, especially when they so strictly serve the central casting functions of menace or comedy. The chief played by Tetsu Komai operates as the first until the indomitable Mrs. Mardick reduces him to the second. I like Utopia, Limited (1893) almost certainly more than the next person, but it doesn't help with the character of Montague, whose fractured command of English and threadbare possession of an old school tie lead him to introduce himself as "the most white man of this place." The handling of the small, dark, almost supernatural figures who skirt the high branches and are brought down on the protagonists by Corder's nervous trigger finger is best summarized with argh. It's nowhere near as bad as Girl of the Port (1930), still my dubious benchmark for regenerative romance sabotaged by gratuitous racism, but it's hard not to feel the movie would have been stronger and more durable with only the hazards of the natural world to contend with. One of the funniest scenes in the first act finds the four white characters sitting under a vine-laced lean-to with their evening clothes disintegrating around them, trying to play a hand of bridge as if in some placid salon while monkeys fall onto the cards, cobras hiss under their seats, an unseen bird shrieks like a Shepard tone and Corder's shirt hosts "something . . . with a lot of legs." It's an exquisite few minutes of colonial satire and it doesn't need a beat of ominous native drums. An animal's scream in the forest is jump scare enough. Then again, I have to wonder whether a party of compass-challenged travelers could even have cut across the Malay Peninsula in 1934 and not stumbled through at least one rubber, coconut, oil palm plantation along the way. Perhaps the film should have taken a page from J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton (1902) and shipwrecked its social satire on a fictional island and a deserted one. In any case, I am quite confident the region is not home to ferret-eating flytraps.
I discovered the existence of this film thanks to a shirtless photo of its director, which feels as fair as anything else: whatever liberties were taken by Bartlett Cormack and Lenore Coffee in adapting the 1931 novel by E. Arnot Robertson, it wouldn't have been a DeMille picture without the scene of Colbert bathing apparently nude in long shot, definitely topless in close-up, under a pounding, primal waterfall. It may not have the cultural cachet of the actress' milk bath in The Sign of the Cross (1932), but it has her wet-stranded hair deniably clinging and a chimpanzee stealing her clothes and Marshall sweeping her up in his arms and awkwardly apologizing, "I didn't want you to get pneumonia," in a hat trick of romanticism, titillation, and WTF. Elsewhere the film seems to have suffered some peculiar cuts, but we've got those particular weird energies intact, a pre-Code special. Should you wish to immerse yourself, it can be streamed freely on the Internet Archive and a restoration appears to be coming out on Blu-Ray later this summer. The tableau-like framing of much of the action makes it difficult for me to tell if the location shooting at Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa paid off more effectively than the artificial jungles of Paramount, but it was photographed by Karl Struss with what looks like a good deal of leaf-filtered natural light and every now and then the camera catches a character's emotion and comes to tracking, circling life; it's another silent trick, but I like the device of translated Morse code running like neon between a ship's wires. I like how really difficult, not just Hollywood difficult, our true lovers remain for much longer than feels like a safe bet. I love how good they look for one another and themselves as they grow. No one in the film even contemplates eating one, but watching it made me desperately want a durian shake from Penang. This recess brought to you by my quiet backers at Patreon.
Given the main attraction of the jungle as played by the volcanic slopes of Hawaiʻi, I respect the efficiency with which the film disposes of such trivialities as set-up, establishing its scenario and even its characters with intertitles, silent-style. "A celebrated newspaper correspondent and radio headliner to whom civilization has given everything" is William Gargan's Stewart Corder, looking every inch the adventurer of the airwaves in his white dinner jacket and pith helmet. "The wife of a British Official in Malaya, who, through her club activities, bends civilization to her objective—this season it's fewer babies" describes Mary Boland's Mrs. Mardick, cradling her Pekinese to her matronly shoulder in some alarm. Herbert Marshall's Arnold Ainger is the "unimportant rubber chemist, too sensitive and shy to shake Life's foot from his neck," glancing warily upward from his just-lit pipe. "And a Chicago schoolteacher, too unimportant even for Life to notice" rounds out the quartet with Claudette Colbert's Judy Jones, nervously patting her tightly pinned hair as she blinks hopefully through her pop-eyed spectacles. A near-montage of bodies sewn up in sailcloth and a sweating radio officer cabling in extremis to Singapore slingshots the audience through the premise of a tramp steamer stricken with plague off the coast of Malaya and into the medias res of a commandeered bumboat aboard which two out of three ship-jumpers are not exactly apologizing for kidnapping the fourth, who stumbled onto their getaway while stargazing: "You don't imagine we wanted to take you, I hope?" Out of the frying pan of one pandemic into another, they come ashore to cholera-fires and the news that the coast is impassable; the only route back to civilization or at least the next freighter to New York lies overland. Under the native guidance of Leo Carillo's Montague, they set out through the lianas and the orchids and the mangroves and the water buffalo and quicker than you can say "Robinson Crusoe," the foursome find their received images of themselves tattering and falling away faster than their picturesquely unsuitable formal clothes. Some blossom, some wilt, some become the finest tailors of leopardskin this side of the Flintstones. On the level of sheer id, it is inspiring how interdependently this film achieves emotional acuity and trashiness. On the levels that deal more in narrative logic, pacing, and not embarrassing the viewer, it's a bit more of a toss-up.
The romance is wonderful. I am an all-day sucker for people growing into themselves and Four Frightened People affords a splendid double example with Colbert and Marshall, initially cast so successfully against type that the audience might hesitate to be stuck in a train compartment with either one of them, much less tramp through a tropical swamp. "Girls like her chaperone themselves," Corder says carelessly of Judy, "—smack into the old maids' home!" Even on the short acquaintance of an opening scene, we can recognize this dismissal as unkind and unfair to a badly frightened wallflower who took the first chance of her life and didn't expect it to turn into Survivor: Malaya, but refuting it won't be as simple as ditching her glasses or shaking out her hair. Her prim, gauche, spinsterly style is merely the outward show of an insecurity so vast and tremulous that she can hardly get a word out in her little paper screw of a voice that isn't apologizing for the imposition; her moments of delight are pathetically childlike, her overtures of geography or gratitude so timidly offered that they all but demand to be rebuffed. It's the kind of trite, dreary, self-fulfilling prophecy of nonentity that realistically afflicts a poor relation raised in the constant consciousness of her burden and it's infuriating. You want to shake a spine into her. It would be like yelling at Jell-O. But at least she might quiver; a look of irritated apathy is the best you'd get out of Ainger, a defeated man masking his self-loathing with a wearily facetious sarcasm that isn't funny enough to justify its relentless pessimism, the passive-aggressive self-deprecation that snipes at anyone incautious enough to show him friendliness or even civility. "No, it isn't very," he shuts down the first and only interest shown his research. "You just smell. Your clothes, I mean. Of chemicals, all the time." It's a marvelously saturnine turn and he may be cordially invited to take a flying leap at a rolling mango—it's one thing when his acid little asides are aimed at the brash journalist always boasting about his dangerous assignments, another when they wound the already downtrodden Judy. Apologizing even weakly for an uncalled-for gibe is one of the first signs of his better nature, just as reproaching him for it is one of hers, but no sparks fly between them until Judy in the wake of a devastating close shave comprehensively and cathartically loses her temper with the men she hardly dared to contradict a night ago. "Oh, stop it!" she flares, shocking their squabbling into silence. "You're like two little boys who've been kept in at recess. I'm disgusted with both of you . . . If I've got to be lost, I'm going to be lost the way I want to be—and do all the things I've wanted to do before I die!" Her long-deferred eruption doesn't spare Corder's chest-beating or Ainger's dyspepsia, concluding with withering finality, "You're a couple of sulky, irascible, egotistical, selfish—men! Montague, cut them loose and then follow me." She stalks off without waiting for a reply from her stunned audience, the field in which she grows her fucks reduced to scorched earth. Her hair streams over her bare shoulders, the journalist's gun—knocked out of his hand at the start of the fight—safe in her purse. Corder fumfuhs something patriarchal and Ainger looks like he's in love. How typically, elegantly pre-Code for a woman's strength to bring out the romance in a man. Where the increasingly threatened journalist tries to reassert his machismo with a forceful kiss that lands like a damp haddock, the chemist softens without self-consciousness, finally opening up in a beautifully bittersweet scene that at once admits his love and assumes its impossibility. Judy's spear-fishing by night, Ainger's literally carrying a torch for her, all the more poignantly because his evocative description of shrinking to fit the world's expectations which draws such wry, sympathetic recognition from her ends with the confession of his marriage. Six months from the film's release, their mutual attraction would be confined to the contrafactual or the tragic. Shooting in the fall of 1933, not only are the lovers permitted to pledge themselves with transcendent adultery to one another using the form of the Christian marriage service while bound back-to-back in a bamboo forest—I don't know whose id this scene represents, but Ainger is even wounded and half delirious, clinging to the lifeline of their love—but Judy can turn her hunter's bow on the person who threatens to smash their paradise: "I'll keep you quiet! Do you think I'm going to give up the only thing I've ever had?" By then we have seen her bringing home what looks for all the world like a great argus for Ainger to fix for breakfast, a Tarzan-Jane reversal played so comfortably that it doesn't even suggest a topsy-turvy of the decivilized world. Judy has chosen a man whose tenderness and competence match her own and the film cherishes it, however it manifests. She looks smashing in her two-piece leopardskin, too, and shirtless he's not bad at all.
The best of Four Frightened People involves this kind of exploration of how people behave when released from their accustomed lives. From his insistent self-aggrandizing, we may suspect almost at once that Corder isn't quite the steel-nerved he-man of his columns and broadcasts, but it's still eye-opening to witness him call a hurried retreat from a river at the splash of a falling coconut or reach for his gun in any situation that spooks him whether it's really dangerous or not. "Out there," Ainger correctly diagnoses, "everything told Stewart Corder how big he was. Headlines, radios, his name in type. Without that here, he shrinks!" and knows it, blustering louder to cover for his deafening irrelevance. He doesn't even speak Malay; that vital skill is surprisingly reserved for Mrs. Mardick, whose first impressions of middle-aged flightiness are revealed to be not so much inaccurate as irrelevant, as she meets the rainforest with redoubtable composure without ever ceasing to coo over her toy dog or mischievously encourage what she imagines to be romances between her younger companions. Held for a ransom of rice by a village of Semang, within the month she has formed an alliance with the local women and introduced the concepts of both Lysistrata and Planned Parenthood to the point where I am left slightly wondering how much of Margaret Sanger is in her DNA. It's a charming, topical cutaway from the main plot and it points not so incidentally toward one of the problems of the film. One run-in with a group of inimical natives may be regarded as a misfortune. Three in a row looks like carelessness, especially when they so strictly serve the central casting functions of menace or comedy. The chief played by Tetsu Komai operates as the first until the indomitable Mrs. Mardick reduces him to the second. I like Utopia, Limited (1893) almost certainly more than the next person, but it doesn't help with the character of Montague, whose fractured command of English and threadbare possession of an old school tie lead him to introduce himself as "the most white man of this place." The handling of the small, dark, almost supernatural figures who skirt the high branches and are brought down on the protagonists by Corder's nervous trigger finger is best summarized with argh. It's nowhere near as bad as Girl of the Port (1930), still my dubious benchmark for regenerative romance sabotaged by gratuitous racism, but it's hard not to feel the movie would have been stronger and more durable with only the hazards of the natural world to contend with. One of the funniest scenes in the first act finds the four white characters sitting under a vine-laced lean-to with their evening clothes disintegrating around them, trying to play a hand of bridge as if in some placid salon while monkeys fall onto the cards, cobras hiss under their seats, an unseen bird shrieks like a Shepard tone and Corder's shirt hosts "something . . . with a lot of legs." It's an exquisite few minutes of colonial satire and it doesn't need a beat of ominous native drums. An animal's scream in the forest is jump scare enough. Then again, I have to wonder whether a party of compass-challenged travelers could even have cut across the Malay Peninsula in 1934 and not stumbled through at least one rubber, coconut, oil palm plantation along the way. Perhaps the film should have taken a page from J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton (1902) and shipwrecked its social satire on a fictional island and a deserted one. In any case, I am quite confident the region is not home to ferret-eating flytraps.
I discovered the existence of this film thanks to a shirtless photo of its director, which feels as fair as anything else: whatever liberties were taken by Bartlett Cormack and Lenore Coffee in adapting the 1931 novel by E. Arnot Robertson, it wouldn't have been a DeMille picture without the scene of Colbert bathing apparently nude in long shot, definitely topless in close-up, under a pounding, primal waterfall. It may not have the cultural cachet of the actress' milk bath in The Sign of the Cross (1932), but it has her wet-stranded hair deniably clinging and a chimpanzee stealing her clothes and Marshall sweeping her up in his arms and awkwardly apologizing, "I didn't want you to get pneumonia," in a hat trick of romanticism, titillation, and WTF. Elsewhere the film seems to have suffered some peculiar cuts, but we've got those particular weird energies intact, a pre-Code special. Should you wish to immerse yourself, it can be streamed freely on the Internet Archive and a restoration appears to be coming out on Blu-Ray later this summer. The tableau-like framing of much of the action makes it difficult for me to tell if the location shooting at Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa paid off more effectively than the artificial jungles of Paramount, but it was photographed by Karl Struss with what looks like a good deal of leaf-filtered natural light and every now and then the camera catches a character's emotion and comes to tracking, circling life; it's another silent trick, but I like the device of translated Morse code running like neon between a ship's wires. I like how really difficult, not just Hollywood difficult, our true lovers remain for much longer than feels like a safe bet. I love how good they look for one another and themselves as they grow. No one in the film even contemplates eating one, but watching it made me desperately want a durian shake from Penang. This recess brought to you by my quiet backers at Patreon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}