Another Disrupted Vacation
Feb. 5th, 2025 05:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
setsuledFleeing from a plague ridden ship into the Malayan jungle are the subjects of 1934's Four Frightened People, a smaller adventure film Cecil B. DeMille made between two of his massive spectacles. It doesn't rank among his best but it is charming.
It's Pre-Code which means star Claudette Colbert has a nude scene, bathing in a waterfall when the two men, played by Herbert Marshall and William Gargan, accidentally interrupt her. Of course a chimpanzee steals her clothes and Marshall insists on carrying her out of the water before she catches an pneumonia. Herbert Marshall was a good actor and he managed to make this absurd excuse sound perfectly sincere. But I couldn't help thinking of Scottie undressing Madeleine in Vertigo, an instance of Hitchcock highlighting the subtextual perversion of scenes like this. Maybe it wasn't so subtextual; I'm inclined to think DeMille was winking broadly at us.
The fourth member of the group is played by Mary Boland, a wealthy society lady who doesn't stop lecturing everyone who can hear on morality and civility when she's captured by the natives. She carries a placid little dog throughout the film. I was amused that the animal is never even mentioned in dialogue.
Colbert's character is a mousy geographer teacher who's transformed into a bombshell by her trek through the jungle. Results from this makeover method may vary.
Four Frightened People is a pleasant diversion and it's available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a Claudette Colbert playlist.
