IMDb meta-data 1 hour and 31 minutes rated 6.5 at from 2846 cinemitizens.
The majesty of the roof of the world in Tibet provides the background to this tale. Peter Cushing is the very British scientist scouting high altitude plants and Sergeant O’Rourke is the bluff American showman. They join forces to search for the Title Character is this Creature Feature with many a difference.
The crass showman explains his desire to profit from the increasing curiosity of people about the world which can now be satisfied by radio, television, and movies. His interest is commercial but he sees a larger meaning in it. Like Benjamin Franklin, he wants to do well by doing good. Cushing’s interest is a personal obsession since he once saw the footprint of a gigantic Title Character. While he is a Sensitive Victorian Age Chap in manner with pipe, tea, and scarf, his interest is personal, not scientific.
Though muted, the collision course is set. Cushing wants to take pictures, open a dialogue, exchange email addresses, and become Facebook friends with the Title Character. Sarge wants to cage one and take it back for show and tell. Maybe run it as a Republican for the Senate from Wyoming. As tensions rise, the worst comes out in each of them.
Sarge gets more huckster and Cushing gets more sanctimonious. They compete vigorously in stereotyping.
Is the Abomie an offshoot of human evolution? Is Abomie an alien hiding out in the mountains, waiting for Zontar? Is Abomie the successor to humanity so that after we all kill each other and leave the Earth will Abomie and company come down out of the mountains to claim the world? Is Abomie id?
There are many nice touches. The telepathy of the Lama and the Abomie added to the spookiness, as did the dark interior of the lamasery. Then there is the whistling and whispering wind in the mountains.
Then one dark and windy night in the high peaks, they shoot and kill an NBA player, eleven feet tall with the shoe and ego size to prove it.
Big.
But dead. Well a dead NB-Abomie might still be worth something, both of scientific and commercial value. Time to pack up and go home.
Ah huh.
Turns out Abomie has family and friends and they want … to give his body an Himalayan burial, cash-in his Opal card, take revenge on the murderer, keep their secret by killing the whole group, or watch 7Mate.
It is 1957 and everyone smokes, even on Mount Everest they stop for a fag.
Before the body count starts.
Between smokes the party of five is reduced, to four, to three…. The guide runs away. Two of the dead have no marks on them, yet they are dead. One of them commits suicide, more or less, and the other dies of fright after reading the script to the end. Two little Indians remain on the India side of the mountains.
To bait a trap Sarge had convinced one of the party to be a scapegoat. And arms him with a rifle loaded with blanks. Nice guy. His excuse was to avoid killing another creature. Not out of concern for the creature but to have a live example to exhibit. Nice guy. Now he has a dead scapegoat.
Yet later Sarge tries to expiate his guilt and finds himself trapped in an avalanche of his own making. As he turns to face it, perspiring, exhausted, gaunt, his fatalism is complete. But that pales next to Cushing’s final confrontation.
Yes, there is no Yeti.
In a display of spunk rare for a 1950s damsel, Cushing’s scientist wife whom he left back in the lamasery making tea and cataloguing the specimens, sets out to find him, fearing the worst. By force of will she drags along his assistant and she finds him. Atta girl! Whew!
There is intelligence and wit in the screenplay that rises above the stereotype of the Creature Feature genre and the subsequent reputation of Hammer Films. Let be said that the reputation is largely undeserved, but there it is.
The comparison has to be ‘The Snow Creature’ (1954), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, which stems from the same premise, scientist and showman in search of the Yeti in the Himalayas, and the two films differ thereafter in every respect. In ‘The Abominable Man’ the natives are accorded respect and even deference, as it is their country. While the showman is crass he can explain and justify his approach and he shows remorse later. The party consists of mixed characters and not disposable cardboard. And Abomie is granted a spirituality denied to the lab specimen in the telephone booth.
The ice and snow came from a second unit working in the Pyrenees, and it is marvellous. No CGI there but guys slogging through snow.
Nigel Kneale wrote the story and then the screenplay, and it is directed by Val Guest who mastered mystery, pace, locale, tension, drama, who dared leave much to the imagination of the viewer. This started as a story called ‘The Creature’ for the BBC two years earlier. This combination of Kneale and Guest produced quality time and again.
Sergeant O’Rourke did several B picture in England like ‘The Strange World of Planet X’ (1958), reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
I found it on Daily Motion and the print I watch was jerky but easy enough to watch and hear.
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