Moviemaking to DeMille was either epic or, at least, extravagant, and in the case of FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE, one of the director's rare contemporary films, the focus was on the latter. Panic ensues on board a Dutch coastal steamer when passengers learn that bubonic plague has broken out.
Four of the passengers escape the doomed ship by stealing a lifeboat and heading for land. They include Colbert, a prim and proper, thickly bespectacled geography teacher from Chicago; Marshall, a rubber chemist tired of his life and his henpecking wife; Boland, the wife of a British official; and
Gargan, a brawling, adventure-seeking newsman a la Richard Harding Davis. Upon reaching shore the foursome meet a half-caste, Carrillo, who prides himself on his drops of Caucasion blood, thinking this racial distinction makes him immune to the jungle terrors, especially vicious native tribes who
fear white men. The four are led by Carrillo through wild jungles and face innumerable perils in their attempt to reach the Malayan mainland. Carrillo's fate is particularly horrible at the hands of a bloodlusting tribe of Pygmies who don't care whether he's got white blood or not.
DeMille indulged himself with this bizarre film and his conduct throughout the production was as bizarre as the story he was telling. After reading the novel by British film critic Robertson, he decided to make the film in the Hawaiian islands. DeMille particularly relished the idea of showing
civilized individuals having their sophistication stripped from them in primitive wilds, leaving them to wander about in terror from jungle jeopardies, living hand-to-mouth, wearing animal skins, their bodies covered with filth. The director sailed for Honolulu in fall, 1933, to map out the film.
He supervised pre-production from his lavish suite in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. When he received a wire that his leading lady, Colbert, had suffered an appendicitis attack just before she was to set sail to Hawaii, DeMille frantically attempted to replace her, wiring urgent cables to Gloria
Swanson and Elissa Landi, offering them Colbert's role. Both stars wired back that they were unable to take on the part due to ongoing commitments. DeMille desperately began interviewing hundreds of local white actresses and was on the verge of hiring an unknown when Colbert wired that she would
reach Hawaii in a week, recuperating on board the ship taking her there. The director made exhausting tours of many islands and finally selected the biggest, Hawaii, as his location.
As usual, DeMille spent lavishly from Paramount's coffers, ordering 50,000 tons of sawdust spread over the crusty lava beds along the gutted slopes of Mauna Loa, a supposedly extinct volcano. Up those slopes 65 tractors dragged light generators and sound and camera equipment, as well as supplies
and tents for the cast members who were soon to undergo the most rigorous work of their careers. DeMille was merciless with his actors, insisting they perform their own stunts. They trekked and staggered and crawled through jungles so dense that the undergrowth had to be whittled away by knives in
spots. They waded through swamps and clomped through lakes of mud while insects covered them and snakes slithered between their legs. When they complained of the hazards, DeMille laughed at them. One scene called for the actors to wade ashore in waters that were reportedly full of sharks. The
director sneered at the challenge and, before his frightened cast, stripped to the waist and dove into the water from an offshore barge, swimming ashore and then back. Marshall had a particularly hard time struggling through the swamps because of the wooden leg he pegged around on, the result of
losing a limb during WW I, but DeMille ignored this noble actor's plight. Wisecracking Boland, however, made light of the hardships and even of Marshall's artificial limb. The entire cast and crew suffered incredible hardships, coming down with jungle fever, jaundice, dysentery, enteritis, and,
because of the thick humidity, headaches so intense that members keeled over from the pain. At night they lay immobile and agony-racked in their skimpy tents with only Colbert's windup Victrola, upon which she played her favorite tunes, to cheer them up. Everywhere spiders the size of saucers
scurried over bedding and food, blood-sucking mosquitoes attacked and scorpions, centipedes, and reptiles of every description crawled over their bodies and into their clothes. Colbert grew so ill that she had to be lowered from a jungle mountaintop in a rickety cable chair that almost broke and
taken to a hospital to recuperate from the ordeal. The only person totally unaffected by the jungle elements and creatures was the tireless DeMille, who considered himself immune to any hazard. When all were prostrate after a 16-hour shooting day, the director would sit in his tent while a single
hurricane lamp flickered in front of him and study maps of the next day's location sites and his impossible camera setups. At dawn DeMille would emerge stark naked from his tent, ordering one of his aides to blow a bugle loudly to awaken cast and crew, then he would run madly into the jungle,
daring the poisonous reptiles lurking there to bite him to death, dash back into the clearing and dive into a bug-infested stream to paddle frantically about for 30 minutes before returning to his tent to get dressed.
though the film was a contemporary story, DeMille still had to get his leading lady naked into a tub or a body of water of some kind. Here, DeMille found the answer to bathing Colbert in the middle of the jungle when he spotted a waterfall. Since the natural falling of the water was not to his
liking, DeMille had dozens of laborers place huge boulders at the top to narrow the stream so that the water fell like a bride's veil. Behind this flow of water Colbert took her shower naked, a handy chimpanzee stealing her clothes so that her curvaceous body was partly visible as she flitted
about looking for some large leaves to cover her form; she and her fellow travelers wind up discarding all their clothes, which had been eaten away by jungle rot, and donning leopard and tiger skins. FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE, for all of its exotic flavor and bizarre events, failed to attract public
interest and the production lost money. Paramount chief Adolph Zukor took DeMille aside and told the flamboyant director, "Better do another historical epic, Cecil, with plenty of sex." DeMille was way ahead of him, already making plans to produce the opulent CLEOPATRA, which would also star his
then-favorite leading lady, Colbert; this time her bath would be much more luxurious. leave a comment