Le mangeur d'hommes

OK, I know how this movie was made. On Day #1 the Producer said "We spent the whole budget on some great tiger footage and rights to a book we're not actually using. Everything has to be on shoestring." To which the Director replied, "we'll use generic Indian Village sets that will leave no doubt we've never left the sound stage. We won't even hire any goats and geese that might make it seem real for an instant." The writer chimed in "I'll use nothing but old cliches about Indian culture and Hemingwayesque white hunters. I won't even give Wendell Cory or Sabu anyone to play against!".

And the casting director said we'll hire white folks to read Indian proverbs!".

And thus "Maneater of Kumoan". The tiger scenes are great, the rest is boring cliches you've seen and heard before.

Believe me the book "Maneaters of Kumoan" is fantastic. Perhaps one scene from the book made it into this awful movie.

I'm not sure why "ceswart" chose the IMDb for his comment but I feel duty bound to point out that it contains three significant errors. First, the Sundarbans, to give the the area its correct spelling, are in Bangladesh, not India. Secondly, the Bangladeshi government maintains foresters who hunt down and kill man-eaters, just like Jim Corbett did for the Indian Forest Service almost a century ago. Third, the total number of humans killed by tigers in all of Bangladesh between 1984 and 2001 was 427, a terrible toll to be sure, but a far cry from 300 a year.

What's really interesting is that the increased prevalence of man-eaters in the area is caused by the increased salinity of the Bramaputra river water. This, in turn, is caused by development upstream, mostly in India, decreasing to total flow and allowing back wash from the Bay of Bengal. The extra salt damages the tigers' livers, enervating them to the point that they become man-eaters. Corbett was right!

I don't mean to be preachy but wouldn't it be better to restrict this forum to movie talk and put social commentary on more appropriate bulletin boards elsewhere on the net?

In typical Hollywood style this film asserts that everyone in India is terribly spiritual and stiflingly serious. They wander about saying profound things about the meaning of life, while nobly suffering in poverty. Add to this a laughably sententious narration and an American on a spiritual quest (which somehow will be helped by shooting tigers)played without a shred of humour by Wendell Corey, and you have a pretty bad film.

But there is the most wonderful tiger footage that makes sitting through the boring bits worthwhile. Well staged attacks on humans and animals, and a sensational sequence when the tiger fights a crocodile, are very exciting and beautifully photographed. No surprises that director Byron Haskin was one of the top cameramen of the silent era - it is when this film does not talk that it is at its best.

Before he made it again in the jungle with THE NAKED JUNGLE, where it was question of ants instead of tigers, the future specialist of science fiction in Hollywood amazed us with this rather unknown underrated adventure movie made for Universal Studios; Byron Haskin made nearly all his career at Paramount. Wendell Corey plays here a hunter chasing a tiger, as Michael Douglas later, in 1997, with THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS, or Bob Stack in 1952 with BWANA DEVIL- genuine material for GHOST AND THE DARKNESS. There is something of Moby Dick in this plot, where a tiger, mythic tiger, replaces a whale. Good intelligent script. Good film.

I fail to understand why people like ceswart and moxie-7 who have almost no understanding of the intricacies of tiger conservation make stupid and wrong statements... There several major mistakes in what they both have said.

1. Two-third of the Sundarbans is in Bangladesh while the remaining one- third is in India.

2. Neither Bangladeshi nor Indian rangers are permitted to kill tigers unless in self-defense (at a time when the tiger attacks someone in front of the ranger).

3. The tiger population in the Sundarbans in 270 as of 2013 and was less (around 220) in 2005.

4. The total tiger (Royal Bengal Tiger) population is just 1400 approx. and human population is close to 7 billion so it is necessary to protect tigers and they should be given preference over human beings in case of a conflict situation.

5. Around 150 individuals are killed by tigers in the Sundarban area (most of them are not killed by man-eaters but by tigers that feel threatened because people venture too deep into the tiger habitat and end up going too close to a tiger or its cubs).

Getting to the topic of this movie... it is very disappointing to say very the least.