JUJIN YUKI OTOKO (1955)

I've been busy over the last few days doing the standard Christmas things but my return to the house the other night was the when I finally finished watching Ishiro Honda's follow up film to GOJIRA. I have been slow to catch up with the great monster filmmaker's lesser known projects and this film falls into that category for odd reasons. According to Wikipedia Japan, the movie was removed from general circulation due to the original screenplay describing the inhabitants of the remote village similar to the Ainu people as being deformed from generations of inbreeding. Knowing this going in I was on the lookout for a nasty attitude in the dialog or even in the way characters act when dealing with the natives but I found no such thing. The version I watched is a poor copy of the full length Japanese film as far as I know and the fan-made subtitles were clear and typo free but perhaps the unknown translator smoothed over the racially charged moments in the story. There were certainly no such references made in the film's dialogue as I saw it, but I would be happy to learn if the translation I have is not quite accurate.

Soon I'll have to watch the American version of the film HALF HUMAN to see what was left after the US scissors went to work. If this Wikipedia entry is true there is probably not much similarity between the two movies--

" The 1958 nationwide U.S. release of this film took sequences of Jujin Yuki Otoko and added extensive new scenes starring John Carradine and featuring Morris Ankrum and two lesser-known American actors, and the entire soundtrack was replaced with American stock music cues, sound-effects, and voice-over narration by Carradine replacing all dialogue in the Japanese scenes.
Toho's costume for the snowman's son was even imported by the new film's makers and used in a scene where the creature has supposedly just been autopsied by Ankrum and is seen lying on an operating table. Including the extensive American footage, this version runs only 63 minutes in total. "

That means that there is a 33 minute run time difference between the two movies and the American version has scenes shot just for the English language film. Holy crap! This should be interesting, especially as I think the Japanese version was a little too long.