Le mangeur d'hommes

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?

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.

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.

Back in the 30's and 40's of the last century, Jim Corbett held the place in the popular imagination later taken up by Jacques Cousteau: an adventurer and passionate crusader for conservation. His books were enormous best sellers so it was inevitable that one would be bought for the movies. "The Man Eaters [note the plural] of Kumaon" described every tiger he had seen or heard of who attacked a human being. In every case he found that the beast was sick or wounded and only killed humans because he was unable to hunt wild game. You may think it a lame effort to exonerate dangerous animals but keep an open mind and then try to figure out how to make such a book into a movie. There might be other ways but this one works marvelously.

A man (an American doctor) shoots at a tiger just as night is falling. He knows he has hit but when he reaches the spot where the tiger lurked he finds one severed toe and a trail of blood. Out of cowardice (the sun is setting)or carelessness (what the hell, it's only a tiger) he abandons the wounded creature to its fate. That's the first two minutes of the movie, in case you miss it.

From here on, while sticking rigorously to Corbett's thesis, the movie utterly abandons his narrative and follows almost exactly the storyline of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." If the movie is not more believable than her book, it is at least easier to understand. The monster has to kill to stay alive and isn't it right,just, even necessary, that it seek out the man who made it a monster? Especially in light of modern ideas about hunting in general and tigers in particular, this version is a lot easier to swallow than Shelley's Man vs. God allegory. I'll go so far as to say that the final scene is so right, so perfectly right, that Shelley would have used it in her book if she had thought of it.

Doctor Wendell Corey is a killer of man-eating cats in India. He has had enough of that and is preparing to leave. However, he comes across a child who is the sole survivor of a group of people killed by a man-eating tiger. He takes the child to a village run by Morris Carnovsky and his son Sabu. He assures them he has come far enough the tiger will not follow. But he is wrong.

It's based on the title of Jim Corbett's -- not that one -- best-selling book about being a character a bit like Corey. Actually, it's based on the title. It's not the first time that Hollywood took a book and threw away what was on the page, and Universal did have Sabu under contract. What shows up on screen is about fate and the need to accept it stoically but creatively. It's a nice exotic little tale, but Corbett, on seeing it, noted that the best actor in it was the tiger.