Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948)

Man-Eater of Kumaon prefigures such films as Jaws, The Ghost and the Darkness, and even Cujo, not just in their man vs. Animal premise, but most notably because they are all the fruit of honest hard work and sheer ingenuity. They sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore. The question is, why can’t they — nay, why won’t they make ‘em like that anymore?  

British hunter Jim Corbett, on whose book the movie is very loosely based, reportedly said that the titular tiger was “the best actor.” He may have meant it as a dig at the human cast rather than to praise the feline; regardless, what’s most striking about Man-Eater — even more so with the benefit of hindsight — is indeed the tiger’s performance. 

That’s not in and of itself shocking; after all, if you think about it, working with animals is the purest form of neorealism. Even a non-professional actor realizes that they are in a film; an animal does not. What baffles me, then, is not that it can be done, nor that it has been done, but how rare it has become.  

Director Byron Haskin and cinematographer William C. Mellor obviously didn’t have CGI, but then they didn’t need it — and as available as that technology (for lack of a better term) has become, I would argue that it remains for the most part unnecessary.  

It’s unnecessary because a movie like Man-Eater not only could be made before the advent of computer-generated imagery but was in fact made without it and better than it could be made today with it; conversely, Man-Eater could be remade today following the same principles that governed the original. as well as improved upon with more sophisticated mechanical effects. 

The means to make Man-Eater have been there for a long time; what lacks these days is the will and the imagination. The prevalent opinion seems to be something along the lines of, ‘gee, now that we have computer graphics we can finally make tiger films’ — and you can all right; you can make them quicker, and easier, and cheaper, with the unfortunate consequence that impatience, laziness, and greed become all too apparent in the unfinished-looking finished product. 

Thus we get The Rock fighting such a lame, phony tiger in Jungle Cruise that I kept expecting it to jump up in the air and yell ‘They’re grrreat!’ or Idris Elba fleeing lions that would be laughed out of the Lion king musical.   

Well, the Man-Eater of Kumaon is no cereal-box tiger; it’s a supra-tiger composed of an actual tiger, rear-projected footage of an actual tiger, and a prop tiger.

Add to that a Potemkin village, a matte painting of the Himalayas skyline, and jungle sets built in Ray Corrigan’s old Movie Ranch, and you get a whole that, when seamlessly edited together, is greater than the sum of its parts — and why is that? Because all the parts are either physical special effects or in-camera techniques; tangible things that the camera can see (and the camera doesn’t lie, it merely embellishes).  

That’s all well and good, but what about the story? That’s also pretty neat; a microcosmic indictment of imperialism (the British Raj had ended just the year prior to the movie’s release) wherein ennui-ridden Dr. John Collins (Wendell Corey) — not an Englishman but a white man nonetheless —, on safari in India, finds himself in a real-time A Sound of Thunder scenario. 

Collins hunts a tiger, and though he only succeeds in shooting one of its claws off, he can’t be bothered to finish the job (the script posits that man-eaters are neither born nor even made, but specifically man-made). No longer possessing a fearful symmetry, the tiger begins to feed on easy prey; i.e., humans (the claw will later be cleverly used to identify a set of footprints as belonging to the man-eater).  

The tiger attacks a woman in the early stages of pregnancy. Collins, who has arrived in the village of Champawat to dump a boy orphaned by the tiger, saves the woman’s life, but she loses the baby and is left unable to bear any more children. 

Since she’s married to the village chieftain’s son, whom tradition dictates must have a son of his own down the line, the consequences of Collins’s reckless actions are liable to have permanent, life-altering effects on the lives of several people, the extent of which Collins’s Western mindset can’t ever hope to fully comprehend even after he has slowly begun to accept responsibility. 

It’s important to note that, while Indians are portrayed as little more than noble savages (even the tiger is implied to be that before Collins maims it), Collins himself is not a Mighty Whitey.

His sense of superiority (reinforced by the meekness of the natives who, to be fair, at first only ambiguously warn Collins of “what might happen” with “a wounded tiger”) belies a deep-rooted self-contempt, and his heroics — insofar as they can be referred to as such — stem more from guilt than bravery. 

That it falls upon him to slay the tiger is his self-inflicted karma, and that he must die in the process the only way to redeem his hubris. Collins doesn’t sacrifice himself; he sacrificed the tiger and the tiger’s victims, and his death is but a means to restore the natural balance that he carelessly disturbed. The ensuing happy ending is a little contrived, but it does drive home the point that no one is going to miss the good doctor. 

All things considered, is everything that happens in Man-Eater 100% factual? Probably not. Is it plausible? Quite so. Does it look like it takes place in the material world and in accordance with the laws of physics? Hells yeah. This little 76-year-old film has more heart, more brains, and more balls than most VFX-driven, blockbuster extravaganzas combined.