Past Misdeeds: The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Botanist Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing), his wife and colleague Helen Rollason (Maureen Connell), and his friend and colleague Peter Fox (Richard Wattis) are spending time in a monastery in the Himalayas to catalogue the local plant life. That the whole botanical business isn't the only reason for Rollason's stay becomes clear when another small expedition, led by the very American Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker), arrives.

John has been hiding from his wife he's been in contact with Friend to help the American in an expedition to the least explored parts of the mountain to find one of John's hobby horses there - the Yeti. Helen is less than amused by her husband keeping this dangerous climbing trip a secret from her until there's no way to keep it secret anymore, especially because the last large scale climbing John took part in nearly killed him and caused him to swear off mountaineering completely. It doesn't help John's case that Helen doesn't believe in the Yeti at all.

Neither Helen nor the monastery's head lama (Arnold Marlé) - who seems particularly interested in people not looking for Yetis - are able to convince John to stay.

So off with Friend, a guide named Kusang (Wolfe Morris), the even more American Ed Shelley (Robert Brown), and a Yeti-haunted greenhorn named McNee (Michael Brill) he goes. The tension between the members of the small expedition mounts once John has copped to the fact that Friend isn't just out to photograph and observe the Yeti, but is in fact on a hunting expedition for a living (or dead) specimen to make a big, international show of P.T. Barnum style. The differences between the men alone would be problem enough, but - this being a SF/horror movie after all - the Yetis themselves are not too keen on letting their existence be known, nor are they dreaming of a freak show career.

The Abominable Snowman was made at a point in the output of Hammer Studios very shortly before the success of their first Frankenstein and Dracula movies would really push their production emphasis in the direction of their own new brand of Gothic horror - though the studio did of course still make films in other genres.

Given that the film is, like The Quatermass Experiment, based on a Nigel Kneale-penned TV film (or mini-series, depending on the source), it will probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone that it's pretty different from the coming wave of Hammer's Gothic horror. Quite like with the Quatermass films, Kneale applies a more cerebral and science-fictional style (and yeah, I know, Kneale said he didn't write SF, but that only proves he was feeling unpleasantly superior to the genre, not that he didn't work in it, see also "squids in space") to typical monster movie tropes.

I don't think Kneale's script is quite as successful as his Quatermass work. It gets a bit draggy in the final third, but it's still thoughtful and intelligent while at the same time putting efforts into holding up the genre-appropriate tension. As is often the case with Kneale, his intelligence is one that puts trust in his viewers to be intelligent themselves, too, so there's nary a hint of unnecessary exposition or of the film telling its audience what to think, yet the script is never vague. Much of the film's qualities lie in Kneale's clever use of telling details, be it his letting the Americans be more racist to what they call "the natives" than Rollason is (though the film's treatment of its Tibetan characters or its lone female character, aren't unproblematic by today’s standards; it's just much better than you can expect from a film made in 1957) without explicitly pointing it out, or just his bothering to think through and explain things like the smallness of Friend's expedition that are dramatically necessary but not exactly realistic.

I also appreciate how Kneale - though it is pretty clear where his sympathies lie - still treats the Americans as actual human beings and not just as symbols for greed and ignorance. They are still shorthand characters, but shorthand characters with the small bit of complexity that makes them more than just parts of Kneale's argument.

Obviously, the most complex script won't take a movie far if the people before or behind the camera aren't up to its standards, but here, too, The Abominable Snowman is in luck.
I hardly need to mention that Cushing (who had played the same role in the TV version) is great, and gives his character just the right mix of a humane softness that makes him believable as the "green", truth-seeking scientist with a physical intensity and energy that makes him believable as a man of action, too. I found it more surprising how well Forrest Tucker - whom I've never pegged as an especially good actor - is able to keep up with Cushing here, but there you have it. The film is of course all the better for having the representatives of its fighting groups of core values both be equally impressively acted.


Director Val Guest always showed his best qualities when it came to adapting Kneale's scripts, too. Guest's direction is far from showy, but if you're actually looking at some of his compositions, or the highly effective way he films the movie's sets, you might realize how effortlessly he emphasizes the script's strengths, deepens the mood and keeps a thought-heavy film moving, while making all this look easy, or rather letting a viewer forget that there's even a need for effort in this sort of filmmaking. Many people writing about movies (I'm definitely not innocent myself here) have a tendency to reserve their greatest praise for the more showy, or just more obviously stylish directors, but there's a real art to a style of direction that makes the director invisible and just lets the film speak for itself.

First Men In The Moon (1964)

The crew of the first moon landing by an UN expedition made up of British, Soviet and American astronauts stumbles onto a little British flag and a declaration of possession of the moon for Queen Victoria made out in 1899.

Hasty research on Earth leads to Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd). Bedford tells the UN the story of his adventure of a lifetime. As a hopeless playwright (which is the only kind of playwright someone can be who never actually writes a play), and well on his way to become a con-man of the sort who has no problems implicating his own fiancée, American Kate Callendar (Martha Hyer), in illegal affairs, Bedford learned that his neighbour Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries) had invented a curious paste with the ability to shield objects from the influence of gravity.

Bedford lied himself into Cavor's trust because he, quite unlike the mad scientist, saw many useful and lucrative applications for the stuff. What Cavor really wanted with his paste was use it to fly to the moon. Bedford, only half a prick, let himself be swayed by Cavor's excitement and agreed to accompany the scientist.

Thanks to Bedford's cons and an accident, Kate also stumbled into the moon capsule when it was about to start, and they all ended up on the moon where trouble with the local population, the Selenites, arose.

When first I realized First Men in the Moon's existence a few months ago, I was quite confused why I had never heard about the movie before, seeing as it was directed by the dependable Nathan Juran, co-written by Nigel Kneale, based on an H.G. Wells novel (if not one of his best, if you ask me) and had special effects by Ray Harryhausen. Having now watched it, I'm not so confused anymore - there may have been a bunch of greats involved, but none of them brought anything even close to their best efforts to the film.

Juran's direction is bland, Kneale's script is - outside of the framing narrative that at least delights with its international moon expedition - devoid of the expected depth and breadth of ideas and never develops any element of the story that could be interesting any further than strictly necessary to let the film slowly lumber on, and the film's narrative is close enough to Wells's original to afford Harryhausen little opportunity to actually do what he does best in the effects area - even most of the Selenites are crappy costumes rather than stop motion creations.

Then there's the fact that the film's first half consists of scene after scene of unfunny comedy that. Does. Not. Stop. It's also less than pleasant how little the movie seems to realize that Bedford is a total tosser and not the charming rogue it thinks he is, so if you hope for some sort of payback for him for all the immoral, illegal, and just really assholish stuff he does, or at least some sort of character development away from being what he starts out as, you will be sorely disappointed. And I don't know why Kate is even in the movie, for she sure as hell is of no import to anything that goes on. Not even her kidnapping by the Selenites is actually important to the plot, making her even less than the usual helpless female stereotype.

It's not all bad though. Once we finally, finally, leave Earth, the "comedy" slowly but surely recedes into the background, and the film turns into your typical fantastic voyage movie with all the basic entertainment value that genre carries in its genes. You'd really need to put a lot of effort into ruining scenes of people in diving suits meeting aliens on the moon, and while nobody involved seems to have had a very good week creatively, they're still experienced professionals enough to not ruin what's left of the film.

First Men also has a secret weapon in form of John Blezard's art direction that shows an eye for the beauties and charms of proto-steampunk-ish devices, giant multi-coloured tubes and curious alien (well, Selenite) cave systems. It's an enthusiastic and wonderful effort in a film that is mostly just coasting on genre standards, and is for me what made First Men In The Moon worth watching beyond my completist impulses and the basic decentness of every cinematic fantastic voyage.

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On WTF: The Abominable Snowman (1957)

aka The Snow Creature

Before Hammer became the House of Horror we all know and love, the company had a much broader portfolio of genres. Case in point are films like this Nigel Kneale scripted SF/horror (with the emphasis on the SF) movie made shortly before Hammer's gothic phase truly began.

It's a fine film however you look at it, and - as always on a Friday - I'll explain in more detail what's going on with it on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,val guest,peter cushing,nigel kneale,forrest tucker,adventure,horror,sf,other places