Undescribable Perfection

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Wendell Corey stars in Man-Eater of Kumaon about an American doctor in India who is both disillusioned and bored with life. He gives up the medical profession for a Hemingway existential existence as a tiger hunter for hire.One of the tigers however that he only wounded has turned into man- killer as the fleeter prey of the jungle he's used to dieting on can no get away from him. And in the strange ways of the Indian jungle that tiger has a bead on Corey now.But for now the tiger is haunting a village where the head man is Morris Carnovsky with his son Sabu and his daughter-in-law Joy Page. The tiger attacks Page and her son with the boy killed and Page wounded enough so that she will not bear more children.And these people won't even accept a young orphan whose parents were killed by the tiger as a substitute. Their patriarchal culture dictates she just go and Sabu marry another who can give him boy children. All I can say is that's better than a Suttee where if Sabu died, Page has to die with him in the same funeral pyre.In the end Corey's more humane western ideas prevail, but only at a sacrifice. Man-Eater Of Kumaon might have benefited from some location shooting in India, but that country was going through a nasty separation war with Pakistan. The rather cheap substitute location doesn't help.On the other hand the vocal narration which is left off, but sounds like Edgar Barrier really makes the animals and especially our killer tiger like characters in the story.A few more dollars for production values could have raised this one a notch or two higher in the ratings.

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.

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.

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.