The Four Feathers ***** (1939, John Clements, C Aubrey Smith, Ralph Richardson, June Duprez) – Classic Movie Review 3059

Director Zoltan Korda’s Technicolor 1939 British version of the much-filmed and well-loved novel The Four Feathers by A E W Mason is the business. This rousing adventure epic movie is the classic rendition of the famous yarn.

Largely forgotten star John Clements is ideal as the stiff-upper-lipped British officer Harry Faversham, who is suspected of cowardice and sent the white feathers of cowardice by his buddies and wife. But he later redeems himself by his demonstration of bravery in the Sudan through secretly aiding his former comrades disguised as an Arab.

There are also especially rich performances from C Aubrey Smith as the old army chatter-box General Burroughs and Ralph Richardson as Captain John Durrance, the blinded buddy whom Clements’s Faversham helps anonymously.

Also in the cast are June Duprez as Ethne Burroughs, Allan Jeayes as General Faversham, Jack Allen, Donald Gray, Clive Baxter, John Laurie, Henry Oscar, Frederick Culley, Robert Rendel, Archibald Batty, Derek Elphinstone, Hal Walters and Norman Pierce.

A fired-up Zoltan Korda directs with a lot of appropriate zest, spirit and élan, while his producer brother Alexander provides the lavish money for the talented personnel, beautiful production and lovely Technicolor, and his other brother Vincent the art direction. The cinematography is by the visual magicians Georges Périnal, Osmond Borrodaile and Jack Cardiff, and the screenplay is by the literary geniuses R C Sherriff, Lajos Biro and Arthur Wimperis.

Its attitudes may have dated but the qualities that make this a great movie haven’t and its power and charms haven’t faded.

It was released on video in 1992 in The Korda Collection and on Blu Ray in 2011. It runs 130 minutes but the cut version runs 115 minutes (this is the TCM print).

It was previously memorably filmed as The Four Feathers in 1929 by Lothar Mendes and King Kong directors Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack, starring Richard Arlen, Fay Wray, Clive Brook and William Powell. This is a silent film with added synchronised sound but no dialogue, and already the third version of Mason’s ripping yarn after 1915 and 1921 films.

It was remade as Storm over the Nile in 1955 and as The Four Feathers in 1976 (with Beau Bridges, Robert Powell, Simon Ward, Richard Johnson, Jane Seymour and Harry Andrews) and again as The Four Feathers in 2002 with Heath Ledger – yes as recently as 2002 so the piece can’t be so dated after all.

June Duprez (1918–1984).

Another largely forgotten star is June Duprez, whose exotic appearances in such British films as The Spy in Black (1939), The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940) made her famous and she quickly relocated to Hollywood in the war. She retired when she re-married in 1948 to well-to-do sportsman George Moffett Jr.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3059

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