Forgotten Films: The Neanderthal Man (1953) 

The poster should clue you in that The Neanderthal Man is standard B-movie fare.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 176th in my series of Forgotten, Obscure or Neglected Films

Sometime over the last year, I DVR’d a bunch of old movies I had never seen. I do this frequently. Sometimes I watch the films, other times I decide that my initial interest has faded and pass them up.

This last week, I was skinning through the recorded shows and I saw the title The Neanderthal Man and thought, “Why the heck not?”

It begins with Professor Clifford Groves (Robert Shayne, mistakenly credited as Robert Shane) living in the mountains of California, where he conducts experiments and formulates theories about Man’s ascent up the evolutionary ladder. He is working at home when he hears a loud noise and a crash. Something has happened in his laboratory.

Local hunter Wheeler is out looking for game and he runs across a saber toothed tiger, which he calls a “big cat,” even though it’s three times the size of a mountain lion and has tusks. Even though he is armed, Wheeler elects not to take a shot. Instead he goes down to Webb’s café and tells his story. No one believes him. Nola the waitress (Beverly Garland) is sympathetic but that doesn’t help. The local game warden George Oakes (Robert Long) decides to investigate and finds the spoor of something big. He makes a plaster cast of it. He takes the cast to Dr. Ross Harkness (Richard Crane), the zoologist at the local university. Harkness thinks it is a manufactured piece, rather than something authentic.

Professor Groves’ evolutionary chart shows Cro-Magnon man prior to Neanderthal and has the hoaxed Piltdown Man on the list. No wonder the local scientists group at the Naturalist’s Club thinks he is loony. And a mad scientist in the California woods is not to be fooled with.

Harkness is aware of some of Groves’ theories, having disputed with them in the past. He has a confrontation with him at Groves’ house when he brings the Professor’s fiancé, Ruth Marshall (Doris Merrick), up from the café where her car has broken down. Harkness is looking for Oakes, who parks his car at the Professor’s house since the roads end there. Groves throws Harkness and Oakes out when he confronts them. The two go out looking for the saber toothed tiger and find it. They kill the beast and go to get Groves so they can have another person verify the kill. They have to wait for Groves to emerge from his lab and when they take him to the spot, the dead body has disappeared. The Professor loses his temper over the wasted time and throws them out again.

Ruth notices changes between the man she fell in love with and the current Professor. And, no wonder! The Professor has run out of test subjects other than a small cat which he injects with an experimental fluid. We can now guess where the tiger has come from.

With his big cat dead, the Professor does what any sane man would do. He injects the serum into his own body. Within minutes he has grown lots of hair and bad teeth. He runs out into the woods and attacks Nola who is posing for photos with her boyfriend. The boyfriend dies in the scuffle.

I don’t think I need to tell you much more of the plot. You know the drill.

The Neanderthal Man is standard B picture fare, nothing startling, nothing revelatory. The acting is OK to poor. The special effects budget was somewhere between $5 and $20. The saber toothed tiger looks amazingly like a real tiger (occasionally on a not-unseen leash) though the tusks are only seen in close up shots. In other words, the saber toothed tiger walking looks like a tiger walking without the saber teeth. The Neanderthal make-up looks like it’s from a bad werewolf movie, replete with the time lapse fur-growing scenes.

But for 1953 drive-in fare, the movie is palatable. Robert Shayne overacts the mad scientist part quite well and slings erudite insults at his Naturalist Club members with ease. And, Beverly Garland is a young Beverly Garland and well worth the attention.

This is not a film to make great effort to see, but if you have 78 minutes with nothing better to do, you could do worse.

Series organizer Todd Mason host Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.

FORGOTTEN BOOK: Run from the Hunter by Keith Grantland (Charles Beaumont and John Tomerlin), 1957

The "wrong man" suspense novel Run from the Hunter takes place around Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, which makes it a fun, fast read for this time of year.

By Scott A. Cupp

This is the 176th in my series of Forgotten Books.

As I write this, Mardi Gras is being celebrated across the country and in New Orleans with fine gusto. I have never been to the various parades and such since I dislike large crowds and drunken revelries as a general rule. But I have friends who are there right now collecting beads, listening to blues and jazz and eating some mighty fine food.

So I decided to celebrate Mardi Gras in a different way by reading a mystery set during Mardi Gras, though in Mobile, Alabama. In Run from the Hunter, Chris Adams is a former columnist for the Mobile Messenger who has been convicted of killing his former girlfriend Steffany Fontaine. There seems to be a motive, since she was running around on him. Adams is innocent and a bartender should have provided the alibi, but, for some reason, the bartender lied and now Adams is on his way to prison via railroad.

Mobster Frank Giogio is on the same train with the same destination intended. But he confides in Adams that the train will be derailed in four minutes. Adams tries to alert the police who do not believe anything he says. They should have listened.

Giorgio is killed when the bridge over the swamp is blown up, as are several policemen. But Adams survives and manages to get the handcuff key and escape into the dark and the bayou. The police are definitely going to be following him.

In the darkness, he manages to find a run-down house and takes shelter. But he is soon surprised by a young woman with a rifle. His case is now well known and the young woman, Loni Gaillard, recognizes him. And so does her mother. Adams tells his story and Mrs. Gaillard believes him. Besides, the rifle has no bullets.

Adams is allowed to sleep the night before he’s sent to see Jericho, an old man who agrees to help him. Jericho has an old Deusenberg that they use to go back to Mobile. Meanwhile, tracking Adams is Lieutenant Carr, the police homicide detective who built the case against him. Turns out, Carr was also one of Steffany’s suitors. He took her death pretty badly and has vowed to track Adams down.

Since it’s Mardi Gras and Adams is afraid of being recognized, he and Jericho stop for costumes, a pirate costume for Adams and a skeleton for Jericho. Adams contacts his former boss, Sheridan “Sherry” Paige, for help. They track down the bartender to question him about his perjury, only to find him dead. Things seem to be progressing poorly for Adams as the police keep getting closer and closer.

Run from the Hunter is a pretty nice suspense and mystery novel, which Beaumont began but turned over to his friend Tomerlin to finish. The duo worked together on the final draft and polish. The original edition was published by Gold Medal under the Keith Grantland name, which Tomerlin says in his introduction to the Centipede Press edition was from the middle names of each of their sons. There were two printings from Gold Medal and a hardback edition in the UK from Boardman. I’ve had both the Gold Medal printings, which had different covers, and I recently acquired the Centipede Press edition, which is very nice and contains a decent short story, “Moon in Gemini,” by the pair.

I have read a lot of Beaumont’s short fiction. I’ve got his solo novel The Intruder, which was filmed in the early 60’s with William Shatner in the lead. I haven’t read it yet, though it has a good reputation. The quality of Beaumont’s short work gives me hope for it. The film version was made by Roger Corman and is one of the few Corman films to not make a profit. IMDB shows a 7.8 out of ten rating for the film. Apparently Beaumont, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson all have bit parts in it.

Centipede Press also did a recent edition of that novel, which is the edition I have. They make very nice books. They are expensive but the quality that goes into the finished product is always worthwhile.

So enjoy your Mardi Gras and have a wonderful weekend. Check out Run from the Hunter if you get the chance. It’s a worthy novel that deserves a larger audience.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.