Like all movie stars, Claudette Colbert, who was one of the biggest box office draws in the industry throughout the 1930s and 1940s, eventually found her commercial luster fading. Colbert was rather unique, however, in her willingness to seek work overseas. She was, after all, born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin in Val-de-Marne, France, although her family moved to the United States when she was three years old. So it wasn't a total surprise when she accepted an offer to shoot Outpost in Malaya (1952) for the British outfit, Pinnacle Productions.

The picture was just the first of many that Colbert would participate in outside of the Hollywood studio system, and Colbert, who made absolutely no secret of the fact that one of her key concerns as an actress was to be paid copious amounts of money, certainly didn't mind the lower British tax rate.

Based on the novel The Planter's Wife (which was actually the film's title in England, after the alternate title, White Blood, was abandoned), Outpost in Malaya finds Colbert in a melodrama that doesn't take advantage of her enormous strengths as a comic actress, but she was a consummate pro who could play almost anything, and handles the overheated material with the expected flair. Still, in light of the reviews the picture received at the time, she and the rest of the cast were somewhat overshadowed by a very real fight-to-the-death sequence between a snake and a mongoose.

Colbert plays Liz, a socialite whose life becomes a lot more than she bargained for when she marries a rubber plantation owner named Jim Frazer (Jack Hawkins, in a role that was originally to be played by Michael Redgrave). Liz soon grows tired of her sweltering plantation existence, and decides that she'll leave her inattentive husband for good when she takes their young son back to school in England. Her plans change drastically, however, when unrest among the Malayan locals turns violent, and she has to join up with her husband to defend their property. This, just so you know, may well be the only chance you'll ever have to see Colbert firing a machine gun.

Director Ken Annakin shot Outpost in Malaya both on location in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) and at Pinewoods Studio in England. Initially, Annakin and producer John Stafford had to unruffle the feathers of some actors who publicly protested that the hiring of the American Colbert was taking work away from worthy British performers. There was also a bit of back-and-forth over how the script should depict the Malayan terrorists who attack the plantation.

In actual fact, Malaya was then dealing with violent Communist insurgents who belonged to the Malayan Races Liberation Army (MRLA), and were effectively staging their own war against the British. British audiences, then, recognized the movie's "bandits" to be Communist terrorists, while Americans - who, via the Red Scare, had a relatively more laid-back concept of the supposed Communist takeover - perceived them as mere products of Central Casting who were trying to rub out sweet little Claudette Colbert.

Director: Ken Annakin
Producer: John Stafford
Screenplay: Guy Elmes, Peter Proud (based on a novel by S.C. George)
Cinematographer: Geoffrey Unsworth
Editor: Alfred Roome
Music: Allan Gray
Art Direction: Ralph Brinton
Makeup: Sidney Turner
Cast: Claudette Colbert (Liz Frazer), Jack Hawkins (Jim Frazer), Anthony Steel (Hugh Dobson), Ram Gopal (Nair), Jeremy Spenser (Mat), Tom Macaulay (Jack Bushell), Helen Goss (Eleanor Bushell), Sonya Hana (Ah Mov).
B&W-88m.

by Paul Tatara