You’ve got to love the Hollywood Production Code - because movies made before it cracked down so stridently on perceived immorality in the motion picture industry are so delightfully racy and exhilaratingly wrong! Cecil B. DeMille’s Four Frightened People was released in January of 1934, four years after Hollywood adopted the Code but seven months before an amendment was tacked on that created the Production Code Administration and prompted the studios to self-censor luridness and unpunished lawlessness in their films. (As early as 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that motion pictures were not covered by The First Amendment.) Slipping in under the wire of censorship, Four Frightened People is (at least to contemporary eyes) a wild, unwieldy but never less than fascinating amalgam of Five Came Back (1939), The Little Hut (1957), Lost Continent (1967) and The Blair Witch Project (1999)… if you can imagine such a thing.

Based on the novel by British writer Eileen Arbuthnot Robertson (who hid her gender, if not her fiercely independent spirit, behind the tony nom-de-plume E. Arbuthnot Robertson), Four Frightened People begins aboard one of those dreary tramp steamers popular with life’s flotsam and jetsam. When bubonic plague breaks out and a Coolie mutiny (the worst kind!) is feared, arrogant war correspondent Stewart Corder (William Gargan) convinces fellow passengers Mrs. Mardick (Mary Boland), a society matron and birth control advocate, and Arnold Ainger (Herbert Marshall), an unhappily married chemist, to abandon
ship. When their escape is nearly foiled by virginal Chicago school teacher Judy Jones (Claudette Colbert), the others take her captive and steal away in the outrigger of an island native (Chris Pin-Martin, “Gordito” of Twentieth Century Fox’s Cisco Kid films) who has paddled out alongside their doomed ship and whom Corder makes their savior-by-gunpoint.

Of course, the joke is on the castaways when they step foot on the island
and find the natives burning the bodies of the victims of a cholera epidemic! Retaining the services of Montague (Leo Carrillo, “Pancho” of the Cisco Kid TV series), a flamboyant aboriginal who believes his tattered British necktie makes
him “the most white man on the island,” the four begin an arduous and potentially fatal trek through the brush to the other side of the island, where they hope against hope they can catch the next freighter back to civilization and resume their normal lives.

At its core, Four Frightened People is about the destructive power of self-deception and self-doubt masquerading as bravado or cynicism. All of the characters are guilty of some degree of personal delusion, whether self-aggrandizing (as in the case of the blowhard Corder) or self-loathing (a failing of the defeated Ainger, who masks his anguish with withering bon mots). Of course, the trial-by-fire of these damaged protagonists is just what the doctor
ordered, with their perilous jungle passage stripping away (along with their tattered city clothing) layers of learned behavior and soul destroying socialization to reveal the essential, vital people beneath. This transformation is illustrated most dramatically in the case of Claudette Colbert’s mousy Miss Jones, who goes from a bespectacled and easily spooked spinster to an emancipated jungle queen in only a matter of days, turning her aloof male companions into instant romantic rivals.

Up until this point, Four Frightened People had been merely violent, lurid, racist and sexist but when Miss Jones washes off the cares of the white man’s world with a waterfall shower, things go positively native…

Is that really Claudette Colbert under that waterfall? And is she really, really naked? Even if it isn’t the actress, and even if the performer in question isn’t really nude, it sure looks like she is! The Catholic League of Decency couldn’t have been too happy about this fleshy bit of business. And not only is a single woman shown (or at least suggested) to be in the all together, the attention she gets from her heretofore hostile male companions is played as voyeuristic in the extreme…

Stylistically, Four Frightened People is all over the place: part romantic comedy (both Corder and Ainger refrain from drinking coconut milk when Montague claims it lessens the male libido), part survival tale (native arrows find their way to two main characters), part “Mondo” movie (even if that carnivorous plant isn’t actually eating that ferret, it doesn’t make the scene any less disturbing) and part out-and-out farce (Mary Boland’s captivity by natives has got to be seen to be believed). However unfocused in its execution, the film is charmingly played by all involved, especially by top-billed Colbert and Marshall (The Little Foxes, The Fly), looking younger and more romantic than you’ve likely ever seen him before. Actual South Pacific exteriors lend verisimilitude to the tale and the photography of Karl Struss (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) lends the production a gloomy eldritch quality that augurs a tragic conclusion that never quite materializes - but damn if Four Frightened People’s fade-out doesn’t get the jump on An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) by almost fifty years!

Four Frightened People was released on DVD last year by Universal Home Video as part of their 5-disc Cecil B. DeMille Collection (packaged with Cleopatra, Sign of the Cross, The Crusades and Union Pacific). While
this film is not sold separately, the online DVD rental outfit Netflix does offer it for viewing apart from the other films. The standard frame transfer looks good for a film of this vintage but the source materials reflect the 79 minute rerelease rather than the 95 minute original release.