This film must have either been greatly edited or quickly disappeared right after the Hays code came in to play a huge part in movie making. There's enough sexual innuendo that would have made Mae West give star Claudette Colbert thumbs up for the bawdiness of this plot of a plain jane who simply has to shed her glasses and get wet underneath a waterfall to suddenly become desirable. She is one of four people who escape from a ship overrun with Bubonic Plague although the other lady (eccentric Mary Boland) is soon carted away by friendly natives of the South Pacific without cause for concern by the three others. Shots of a small monkey being swallowed by a Venus fly trap and various other creatures seem straight out of a 30's Frank Buck movie. Claudette is rightly horrified by the shot of the monkey, but it is the shot which begins to awaken her feelings of being alive. Once fellow passenger Herbert Marshall comes across her taking a shower in the buff under the waterfall, his feelings awaken for her, and there is no turning back to the plain girl she was before.
A story like this can't help but be entertaining even if preposterous. As usual, director Cecil proves his movies are not the ordinary run of DeMille. Colbert, seen as Cleopatra in another DeMille movie the same year (as well as having been in his 1932 epic "Sign of the Cross") makes an unconvincing non-beauty even with spectacles and no makeup. It is ironic that once she takes that waterfall shower, suddenly her face is fully glowing as if she had just visited Elizabeth Arden in a nearby native village. Boland adds some humor, but Marshall and William Gargan are rather bland. The final shot of Colbert back in civilization is a real eye raiser, especially if you happen to be in the teaching profession.
A story like this can't help but be entertaining even if preposterous. As usual, director Cecil proves his movies are not the ordinary run of DeMille. Colbert, seen as Cleopatra in another DeMille movie the same year (as well as having been in his 1932 epic "Sign of the Cross") makes an unconvincing non-beauty even with spectacles and no makeup. It is ironic that once she takes that waterfall shower, suddenly her face is fully glowing as if she had just visited Elizabeth Arden in a nearby native village. Boland adds some humor, but Marshall and William Gargan are rather bland. The final shot of Colbert back in civilization is a real eye raiser, especially if you happen to be in the teaching profession.