The Abominable Snowman *** (1957, Peter Cushing, Forrest Tucker, Maureen Connell, Richard Wattis, Robert Brown) – Classic Movie Review 1,267

Writer Nigel Kneale turns his 1955 BBC TV play The Creature into the intriguing, intelligently written, decently acted 1957 Hammer horror film The Abominable Snowman, with Peter Cushing reprising his star TV role. 

Writer Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale turns his then once famous 1955 BBC television play The Creature into this intriguing, thoughtfully and intelligently written, decently acted 1957 Hammer Films horror movie The Abominable Snowman from director Val Guest.

Reprising his TV role, Peter Cushing stars in The Abominable Snowman (1957) as English scientist John Rollason, who arrives at the monastery of Rong-ruk while on a botanical expedition to the Himalayas. When a second party turns up, Rollason joins the American expedition of four led by American glory-seeking adventurer showman Tom Friend (played by Forrest Tucker) to search for the legendary, all-threatening abominable snowman Yeti (Fred Johnson) in the Himalayan peaks.

What they discover in their exploits is more than they can handle, of course, when the one Yeti the Americans shoot prompts other Yeti to try to retrieve their fallen comrade with extra-human powers.

It is eerie and intelligent, and all quite fun with bursts of tense action, but unfortunately time has not been particularly kind to The Abominable Snowman and alas it now seems creaky, stagy and not very scary at all. Guest is a good director and does manage an effective claustrophobic atmosphere. But he does not always use the screenplay’s strengths to conjure enough nerve-jangling tension.

And Hammer’s budget clearly did not run to convincing creatures, breaking a cardinal rule that, if you have not got enough resources or are in any doubt, do not show the monster.

Nevertheless, Cushing and Tucker are excellent, Maureen Connell (as Cushing’s wife Helen), Richard Wattis (as his assistant) and Robert Brown (as trapper Ed Shelley) are good in star supporting roles, and it is entertaining as a relatively still rare British monster movie.

The US cut version is called The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and runs six minutes shorter at 85 minutes. It was released in the US in a double bill with The Trollenberg Terror (1958), which also starred Forrest Tucker.

Peter Cushing is reprising the role of John Rollason that he had played in the TV play The Creature. It was his second Hammer film after The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) that brought him international fame. Before his 22 Hammer films, he was best known as a TV actor, especially in Pride and Prejudice (1952), Beau Brummell (1954) and most notably in the Nigel Kneale scripted production of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Production of The Curse of Frankenstein had begun on 19 November 1956 at Bray Studios and it premiered in London on 2 May 1957 at Warner Theatre in Leicester Square.

Shooting on The Abominable Snowman began with a second unit location shoot at La Mongie in the French Pyrenees from 14 January 1957 to 24 January 1957 with doubles used for the actors. Principal photography took place between 28 January 1957 and 5 March 1957 at Bray and Pinewood studios.

The Abominable Snowman was released on 26 August 1957, with an A certificate from the British Board of Film Censors, as part of a double bill with Untamed Youth, starring Mamie Van Doren. The release of The Abominable Snowman was overshadowed by the huge success of The Curse of Frankenstein, and it was a relative financial failure.

Two other actors reprise their roles from the TV play: Arnold Marlé (as The Lhama) and Wolfe Morris (as Kusang).

The music is by Humphrey Searle in his only score for Hammer, apparently influenced by Ralph Vaughan Williams’s score for Scott of the Antarctic (1948).

Is the only Hammer film produced by Aubrey Baring, a member of the Barings banking family, and the last made in association with American producer Robert L Lippert, who co-produced many of Hammer’s films in the early 1950s. Under these co-production deals, Lippert provided an American star in return for the rights to distribute Hammer’s films in the US.  After the success of The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer could deal directly with the main US distributors.

They planned to called it The Snow Creature but director W Lee Wilder had used the title with The Snow Creature (1954).

Hammer based this film, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2 (1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) on Nigel Kneale’s TV shows.

Val Guest attributed the film’s relative financial failure to the intelligence of the script: ‘It was too subtle and I also think it had too much to say. No one was expecting films from Hammer that said anything but this one did… audiences didn’t want that sort of thing from Hammer.’

Guest’s lengthy roster of films also includes the science-fiction classics The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2 [Enemy from Space] (1957) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961).

He was married to the actress Yolande Donlan from 1954 until his death on 10 May 2006, aged 94. Donlan was born on June 2 1920 and died on 30 December 2014, aged 94.

Maureen Connell was married to John Guillermin, the director of The Towering Inferno, King Kong (1976) and Death on the Nile. She also stars in the same year’s Lucky Jim (1957).

Hammer Films planned a new version in 2015, re-imagining it with a modern-day twist. Hammer CEO Simon Oakes and producer Ben Holden reveal: ‘We’re not remaking the Val Guest film. We’re starting again from scratch. That creature or myth is part of the Hammer library or lexicon, and we wanted to develop something around it. Our version of will have something of the uncanny about it and it’ll have the mythology and all the big Nigel Kneale ideas of man and beast and nature.’ In 2023, it is still in development.

The cast are Forrest Tucker as Tom Friend, Peter Cushing as Dr John Rollason, Maureen Connell as Helen Rollason, Richard Wattis as Peter Fox, Robert Brown as Ed Shelley, Michael Brill as Andrew McNee, Arnold Marlé as The Lama, and Wolfe Morris as Kusang,

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1,267

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