Friday, February 17, 2023

Four Frightened People (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)


Passengers on a ship discover that the bubonic plague is spreading among the Chinese crew. If the passengers had holed up in their cabins avoiding human contact, it might be a movie for the pandemic, but it starts with four passengers having escaped on a small boat. I don't know why they weren't free to leave, but they pay the native working the rudder and one of the guys holds a gun on him.

They go to an island. They need to get to the other side to catch another boat out of there but they'll have to go through the jungle on foot and do so in formal dress, one of the women carrying a little dog.

Claudette Colbert as a spinster geography teacher who blossoms in the jungle. Picking up the gun one of the men dropped during a brush with hostile natives did it as much as anything else.

Colbert tells off her two companions the natives left tied to a tree.

"What's got into her?" one of the men says. "She's turned into a woman."

It was reminiscent of a line from Tennesse Williams' Night of the Iguana:

"I thought you were sexless. But you've just become a woman. You know how I know that? Because you, not me, are taking pleasure in my being tied up."

Pre-code. A little implied nudity. Claudette Colbert's body double bathes in a waterfall wearing a body suit.
    
78 minutes. I watched it on DVD from Netflix.

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