Four Frightened People

Four Frightened People (1934)

Runtime: 78 minutes

Directed by: Cecil B. DeMille

Starring: Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, Mary Boland, William Gargan, Leo Carillo

From: Paramount

This was hokum for sure, but at least entertaining hokum. The Criterion Channel currently has a collection of Claudette Colbert films; as I haven’t seen too much of her work (despite her role in making It Happened One Night a classic) and Cecil B. DeMille usually creates grand spectacles. The film is only 78 minutes in length; the original cut was longer-of course it’s long gone by now.

Whether or not it was the intent for Colbert and Mary Boland to be much more likable than the dumb men portrayed by Herbert Marshall and William Gargan, but that’s how it plays in 2025. They were the titular four frightened people who escaped (well, Claudette was literally dragged along by the jerk males, even though they loudly boasted that they weren’t sexually attracted to her!) from a boat that has the bubonic plague. They end up on a Malayan island-actually filmed in what is now the state of Hawaii-so the quartet plus a guide are forced to walk through the jungle for days to reach the next ship.

The movie is foolishness where Colbert is supposed to not be a stunning beauty because she’s a dowdy schoolteacher from Chicago who-gasps-wears glasses. Hilariously, her character (Judy Jones) claims that her great-great-great grandfather was John Paul Jones… the Revolutionary War Naval commander, not the Led Zeppelin bassist! Naturally it’s not the most enlightened look for Jones to suddenly come out of her shell and be bold.. by in part, letting her hair down, having her glasses broken, and due to contrived circumstances, dressing “sexy” after bathing in a waterfall! 

It was so ludicrous, I had to laugh—even if the behavior of the jackass men after she became “sexy” was exactly as “enlightened” as you’d expect. As it’s the 1930’s, even after she becomes a badass who literally spears fish, there’s still melodrama and Judy’s still weepy. Complaints aside, the jungle setting is well-realized, with its exotic smells, unusual sounds for those white people, and plenty of wild animals-including a cobra. Thankfully, I could like this pulpy film that clearly was based on an old pulpy novel.