MAN BEAST

(US 1956)


b/w

RT: 67 mins
Pro Co: Jerry Warren Productions/Medallion TV
Dir/Pro: Jerry Warren;
Wr: B. Arthur Cassidy;
Assoc Pro/2nd Unit Dir: Ralph Brooke.
Phot: Victor Fisher;
Film Ed: James R. Sweeney;
Mus Dir: Josef Zimanech;
Art Dir: Ralph Tweer.
Script Sup: Brianne Murphy.

Cast: "Rock Madison", Virginia Maynor (=Asa Maynor), George Skaff, Tom Maruzzi,
Lloyd Cameron (=Lloyd Nelson), George Wells Lewis, Jack Haffner, Wong Sing.

INTRODUCTION

The mid-1950s saw a short-lived cycle of movies dealing with the subject of the
yeti or "Abominable Snowman", probably as a result of press reports of sightings
by members of Sir Edmund Hillary's Everest expedition of 1953. Among the titles
that appeared were W. Lee Wilder's The Snow Creature (1954), Inishiro Honda and
Kenneth G. Crane's Half Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman and Val
Guest's The Abominable Snowman (both 1957), along with the film under review
here, Man Beast, which marked the directorial debut of former bit part player
(Ghost Catchers 1944) turned trash auteur Jerry Warren.

SYNOPSIS

Connie Hayward and Trevor Hudson arrive at a remote Himalayan trading post,
hoping to catch up with a Professor Erickson. Unfortunately the owner of the
trading post tells them that the Professor and his team had left for the
mountains the day before. Just then, another Westerner appears and introduces
himself as Steve Cameron. When he hears the woman's surname, he recollects a
Doctor James Hayward from some time previously, and explains that Hayward left
several days ahead of Erickson's main party in order to establish a base camp
high in the mountains. Connie tells him that the reason that they have
travelled so far is to contact the Doctor, who happens to be her brother, on a
matter of life and death, and she resolves to follow the expedition. Later,
Cameron informs her and Hudson the purpose of the Erickson expedition is try and
capture a living example of a strange creature know as a yeti or "Abominable
Snowman". When asked if the beasts are dangerous, he replies that the last four
parties to venture into the area all lost at least one member. Hudson expresses
grave reservations about going any further, while Cameron insists that they
cannot journey into the mountains without the help of local bearers, and they
will only follow one man called Warga, and he has already left with the Erickson
team. Connie, stressing the importance of finding her brother manages to
convince Cameron, who is impressed with her determination, to show them the way
to the Erickson camp. The trio leave immediately and make their way through the
hostile terrain, scaling sheer rock faces and avoiding avalanches. Despite
calls to rest by Hudson, their guide suggests that if they carry on, they will
cut the time between them and Erickson quite dramatically, to which Connie
agrees. That night there is further friction from an increasingly reluctant
Hudson, resulting in him retiring to his own tent. Cameron and his client
discuss the legend of the yeti, including his meeting with people who claimed to
have witnessed their activities. Sometime during the next day, Erickson and his
team are spotted through binoculars some distance. A pistol if fired to attract
their attention, which succeeds, and the expedition waits on the arrival of
Connie and her party. After meeting up with Erickson and Connie explaining the
purpose of her own journey, the combined group continue higher up into the
mountains. After some time traversing the increasingly bleak landscape, Connie
is of the opinion that the yeti are a myth, since it seems so unlikely that
anything could survive in such an inhospitable environment. She asks the local
bearer accompanying the party whether he has ever come into contact with the
creatures, but his reply is ambiguous. High above the mountains' snowline, the
group eventually discover the base camp, completely destroyed and with no sign
of life anywhere to be found...

REVIEW

For those familiar with Jerry Warren's subsequent output as a filmmaker, Man
Beast may come of something as a revelation.

From 1957 until 1966, Warren's productions can be divided into two camps. The
first, including such fare as Teenage Zombies (1958) and The Wild Wild World of
Batwoman (1966), were domestically produced ventures, shot on impossibly low
budgets and tight shooting schedules, and displaying all the shortcomings its
circumstances would indicate as a badge of honour. The other group was made up
of cheaply acquired foreign-language movies (often from South of the Border),
which Warren then spared every expense redubbing and recutting, before inserting
cheaply and hastily shot addtional footage, featuring slumming character actors
like John Carradine and Robert Clarke, as well as members of Warren's own stock
company, notably Katherine Victor. The resultant "patchwork" efforts, whose
titles included The Face of the Screaming Woman (1959), Invasion of the Animal
People (1962) and The Curse of the Stone Hand (1964), bore very little
resemblance to the original works and are often largely incoherent. Thanks to
some very alluring titles, and imaginative marketing by Warren and his
distributors, however, they did prove very attractive to unsuspecting audiences.

Man Beast does share some faults with the filmmaker's other ventures, notably
threadbare production values, mismatched stock footage and ineptly handled
dialogue scenes. To compensate for this, the film does offer other, more
positive, features that set it apart from the rest of the Warren canon.

Probably the enterprise's biggest asset is the screenplay by B. Arthur Cassidy,
whose only credit this appears to be (implying that the name could, in fact, be
a pseudonym). While certainly lumbered with an excess of mundane expositional
dialogue, it does have in its favour two related plot strands, Connie's search
for her dangerously ill brother and Professor Erickson's obsessive quest to
discover the truth about the legend of the yeti, which combine to provide the
narrative with a stronger momentum than is normally found in bargain-basement
genre product.

Cassidy also introduces a feature that was all too uncommon for genre cinema of
the time, a strong female character in the form of Connie Hayward, as played by
Virginia Maynor, who proves to be as tough and resilient as her male
counterparts, often more so. Here, although exhausted and freezing, she
continues her journey through the Himalayas, despite the protestations of her
much weaker companion, Hudson (Lloyd Cameron), who struggles to keep up. It is
easy to see why her impressively feisty character would feature so prominently
in the schemes of the villain of the piece.

Some refreshingly ambitious pulp science fiction concepts also feature in the
screenplay. Among them is the fact that Warga (George Skaff, The Incredible
Petrified World 1957) represents a new strain of yeti/human hybrid, part of an
ongoing scheme to breed out the more obvious physical traits of pure-bred yetis
in order to become more humanoid in appearance. As the latest stage in this
evolution, Warga has successfully passed himself off as a homo sapien,
travelling abroad and being educated to college level, but still retains some of
the characteristics of the yeti such as excessive body hair, an aversion to
rises in temperature and apparently an ability to use ESP, through which he
controls his more primitive cousins.

Ultimately, Warga's intention is to create a new species which will infiltrate
the human world, eventually gaining control of it. To this end, he believes
that mating with someone with the qualities inherent in Connie Hayward will
speed up the evolution of his project quite dramatically, by as many as two
generations. In an amusing piece of irony, earlier on in the script Professor
Erickson (George Wells Lewis), impressed by Warga's intellectual, and especially
his physical, capabilities, suggests that he should marry and disseminate his
superior genes amongst future generations, something of course which he was
intending to do, but for a different purpose. The implied bestiality and rape
subtext, which is actually rather obvious, is very daring for a film of this
era.

A potentially interesting subplot that is referred to in the script, but later
abandoned, is that involving Connie's brother who, it turns out, is the
recipient of a mysterious experimental serum which, it has been discovered,
reacts violently when the host is subjected to high altitudes. Quite how this
reaction manifests itself and how it would tie in with the rest of the plot is
never examines, and may have been an additional plot element too many for the
film's meagre running time.

Given the patchwork nature of most of Jerry Warren's productions over the years,
there has been some debate over his actual contribution to the making of Man
Beast. While incorporating a lot of footage from a much earlier, unidentified,
mountaineering documentary, together with grainy generic library shots of the
Himalayas, a significant portion of the movie was shot in the ubiquitous Bronson
Canyon and, more importantly, Bishop County, California, and is usually
attributed to second-unit director Ralph Brooke.

This exterior-shot material tends to stand out from the rest of the picture, not
only because of the unique visual quality that locations afford the production,
but also, despite its rudimentary execution (Victor Fisher's cinematography is
merely functional), because there is an underlying energy which is largely
absent from that located on interior sets. Often the difference in quality
between interior and exterior sequences is quite marked, notably from the second
act onwards when dialogue exchanges between characters reveal very poor
direction, and some decidedly awkward performances, particularly George Wells
Lewis who looks desperately ill at ease.

With Warren's reputation for claiming much of the credit for others' work in his
later composite works, some reviewers have suggested that since Man Beast
features such a significant amount of location footage shot by Ralph Brooke,
whose best-known work remains his gory 1961 Bloodlust!, a retread of Irving
Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Most Dangerous Game (1932), that the movie
actually began life as a solo Brooke project, with Warren taking over the
venture in order to complete the film so that it could be shown to potential
distributors. If this is indeed the case, it is truly remarkable that a sense
of continuity has been maintained throughout and, unlike the majority of
Warren's efforts, remains coherent overall.

While there are no truly outstanding scenes in the movie, some are of interest,
such as a yeti emerging from a snowdrift, and a flare-lit exploration of a deep
cavern, which proves to be quite atmospherically staged. Unfortunately, this
sequence is marred by a poorly edited yeti attack, where one costumed actor
plays several of the creatures by running to an fro in front of the camera. It
must be said that the actual yeti suit is very well made, capturing the weird,
bestial nature of the animal, the face-mask being probably the most effective
part of the costume.

Special mention should be made of the library music employed by musical director
Josef Zimanich, which is very well integrated into the movie, adding an extra
layer of mystery and menace to the proceedings.

As to be expected from such a low-budget venture, the performances are variable,
with Lloyd Cameron, and especially female lead Virginia Maynor proving to be the
weakest. Compensation is provided by Tom Maruzzi (who sometimes also dabbled as
a screenwriter in the early 1960s), as the athletic hero, and George Skaff, both
of who appear as strong, authoritative in their roles.

Man Beast ends with a brawl on a mountainside between Maruzzi and Skaff, after
the former manages to shoot a yeti ordered by the latter to kill him. In what
may be seen as another piece of irony employed by B. Arthur Cassidy, Skaff, the
consummate mountaineer, falls to his death from a cliff face, after his
grappling hook dislodges itself.

This remains a minor triumph of the pulp imagination and the best film with
Jerry Warren's name attached to it.


(c)Iain McLachlan 2004

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