The Four Feathers is a 1929 American sound war film directed by Merian C. Cooper and starring William Powell, Richard Arlen, Clive Brook and Fay Wray.

While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process.

[7]: 53–55  Back in California, the producers built a large camp between Palm Springs and Indio to shoot the actors themselves in fight scenes.

[7]: 56 Adolph Zukor, Paramount studio head, insisted on the film having no talking sequences, even though the directors wanted it to be a talkie.

[10]: 174–175 Peter Limbrick, assistant professor in film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, noted that The Four Feathers is a masculine adventure that values power above other virtues and excludes women.

[7]: 56–57 Cooper's comments to others while abroad showed that he viewed all black people as racially inferior, a settler superiority that leads to the narrative found in The Four Feathers, which is "responding less to the facts of the land than to preexisting colonial visions of it, and disavowing indigenous habitation and meaning.

"[7]: 58  Jeffrey Richards referenced how the characters of the young soldiers fulfilled the "Imperial hero" archetype: tall, thin, and mustached.

[12] Kamran Rastegar notes that Cooper's Feversham shows resentment and anger when reincorporated into the military and reunited with Ethne.

"[6]: 53–54  Fear of "a corruption of masculinity" is a constant theme in this and other versions of The Four Feathers, the fantasy of redemption through service to an empire leads to "a revalorization of" colonialism.