Man-Eater of Kumaon

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.

Wendell Corey is a very disaffected doctor traveling through India. On a safari, he shoots at a tiger and blows off part of its paw--but the animal manages to escape. Now, injured, the tiger has a hard time capturing fast prey and resorts to catching a very slow one...people! Now you'd think Corey might feel a tad responsible for this, but he's so busy brooding and feeling sorry for himself (he's lost his wife and given up his practice). Later, however, after he gets to know the people, Corey cannot help but go back to the jungle in search of this man-hunter. And now, it's either him or the tiger...

The one thing anyone will notice about the film is that apart from Sabu and one or two others, the rest of the Indian cast is made up of white and Hispanic actors in body paint. This is kind of offensive--perhaps they had trouble finding Indians (from India) in the States at that time, though I assume if they'd tried harder they could have. As the result of this and a script that seemed filled with the inevitable, it's only a minor time-passer. Not bad--just not particularly good.

By the way, while you see a toucan in the film, they are only found in the Americas--not in Asia nor anywhere near it.

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.

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?