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Four Frightened People (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)
Mary Boland, William Gargan, Herbert Marshall, and Claudette Colbert in Four Frightened People
Cast: Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, Mary Boland, William Gargan, Leo Carillo, Nella Walker, Ethel Griffies, Tetsu Komai, Chris-Pin Martin, Joe De La Cruz. Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, Lenore J. Coffee, based on a novel by E. Arnot Robertson. Cinematography: Karl Struss. Art direction: Roland Anderson. Film editing: Anne Bauchens. Music: Karl Hajos, John Leipold, Milan Roder, Heinz Roemheld.
Four Frightened People is a film that keeps running off in various directions: Sometimes it’s an adventure thriller, sometimes a romantic drama, and sometimes it’s a comedy of manners. It’s as if Gilligan’s Island suddenly turned in mid-season into a grim struggle for survival, and then went goofy all over again. A movie so muddled needs the help of strong casting, but instead it has four actors who look like they needed the work and this was the best they could find. As the nominal romantic leads, Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall have no chemistry, even after she stops being a mousy schoolteacher and starts slinking around in leopard-skin outfits, Mary Ann metamorphosed into Ginger. Marshall’s chief rival for her attention, a macho adventurer played by William Gargan, is just a bullying grouch. And Mary Boland is there for comic relief as a feather-brained dowager clutching her lapdog to her breast, a shtick that gets so tiresome we need relief from the relief. It’s the kind of movie that raises only one question: What the hell were they thinking when they made it?
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Cleopatra (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)
Cleopatra (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)
Cast: Claudette Colbert, Warren William, Henry Wilcoxon, Joseph Schildkraut, Ian Keith, Gertrude Michael, C. Aubrey Smith, Irving Pichel, Arthur Hohl, Edwin Maxwell, Ian Maclaren. Screenplay: Waldemar Young, Vincent Lawrence, Bartlett Cormack. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Roland Anderson, Hans Dreier. Costume design: Travis Banton. Film editing: Anne Bauchens. Music: Rudolph G. Kopp.
Claudette Colbert’s Cleopatra arrives rolled up in a rug and meets her end by clasping a rather limp garden snake to her bosom, and in between there’s a lot of posing and tin-eared dialogue superimposed on the story told by Plutarch and Shakespeare. It won’t do, of course, except for the camp extravagance of Hollywood awash in Cecil B. DeMille’s usual sin, sex, and sadism. If the 1963 version of the story had been this entertainingly vulgar, it might have made money.
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Judge Priest (John Ford, 1934)
Stepin Fetchit and Will Rogers in Judge Priest
Cast: Will Rogers, Tom Brown, Anita Louise, Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, Henry B. Walthall, David Landau, Rochelle Hudson, Charley Grapewin, Berton Churchill. Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, Lamar Trotti, based on stories by Irvin S. Cobb. Cinematography: George Schneiderman. Art direction: William S. Darling. Film editing: Paul Weatherwax. Music: Samuel Kaylin.
John Ford’s Judge Priest fits neatly into the period, roughly from 1915 (the year of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation) to 1939 (the year of David O. Selznick’s* Gone With the Wind), when Hollywood filmmakers were catering to audiences in the American South, eager for validation that their “lost cause” had been sacred and not the act of treason that it really was. So it’s not surprising to find in the cast of Judge Priest both an actor from Griffith’s film, Henry B. Walthall, and one from Selznick’s, Hattie McDaniel. Ford’s film, in which there’s a joke about lynching and which concludes with a rousing performance of “Dixie” complete with waving of the Confederate battle flag, is hard to watch today, except for its historical interest not only as an example of what movie audiences tolerated in 1934, but also for its glimpses of a then much-loved star, Will Rogers, and his occasional film sidekick, Stepin Fetchit, a comedian who was attacked as an Uncle Tom, but whose work has since been re-evaluated and appreciated for its skill. Judge Priest is also one of the few films in which McDaniel was allowed to sing, a talent she possessed in abundance. Otherwise, it’s pretty wince-inducing.
*Yes, Victor Fleming was the credited director of GWTW, but if ever a movie deserved to be credited mainly to its producer, it’s that one.
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The best weapon a woman has is a man’s imagination.
TARZAN AND HIS MATE [1934]
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1934 Soviet Central Asia. 3 Soviet Republics. Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan
Source: Pinterest / fabienne jerot
Published at: https://digitalpostermuseum.com/travel/soviet-union-travel-poster-and-ad-collection/
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‘As Tsak, the two-headed monster advances toward Flash and his friend, Flash slips and falls! Prince Thun of the Lionmen leaps to his rescue! …’
Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, February 25, 1934.
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SEE…?
Gif from ‘pocketwatchdog’ (reblog of a post by 'zoirohs’)
Film: THE THIN MAN (1934), directed by W S VAN DYKE, starring WILLIAM POWELL and MYNA LOY
