OUTPOST IN MALAYA / THE PLANTER’S WIFE (1952)

Pushing 50, Claudette Colbert had cut way back on her workload by the time she made this British mid-lister, the latest waning Hollywood star hired to add commercial luster to a British production.  Set on a rubber tree plantation in Malaya (hadn’t this industry gone all synthetic post-WWII?), she’s going thru a bad patch with husband Jack Hawkins just as the country’s going thru an even larger bad patch with marauding Commie rebels.  These natives not only restless, but leftist, a threat to the posh lifestyle of the British colony.  For Claudette, it’s so long cocktail dresses & tony clubs; hello slacks & Tommy guns.  Yikes!*  With lots of location shooting, just not for the lead actors who stick to process shots and sets at PInewood Studios, handled better than usual by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth via trick effects & well-matched angles and film stock.  Journeyman director Ken Annakin had yet to lose all personality on big-budget anodyne family fare (MAGNIFICENT MEN AND THEIR FLYING MACHINES; CHITTY-CHITTY BANG-BANG) and brings off what people once thought of as Colonial slice-of-life atmosphere.  Servant/master relationships; the lifestyle & strict dress code of the gin & tonic set; the care & bleeding of those damn rubber trees; the ironic away-from-home ultra-patriotism of the locally born & bred Brits; the young scion with his native BFF.  Oops, a step too far on that last one since the local ‘pal’ is played by a White kid in dark body make up.  (Boo!)  All other Malaysians, more or less Malaysian.  By the third act the whole thing turns into something of a Far East American Western.  Smartly staged though, and pretty suspenseful as the underdefended estate comes under enemy attack and we wait for the Cavalry . . . er, British military relief. followed by marital resuscitation and a pledge to see it out while the boy heads home to England for safety & school.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *In John Ford's DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK/'39, Colbert sides with the Revolutionaries to battle American Indians fighting with the Brits in the American Revolution.