Elizabeth, I enjoyed your photos from the Kickapoo River. I don't recall you mentioning it before but it's a beautiful place and so green. Your pic of the river reminded me of "Tom Sawyer" and it's interesting to note, I think, that so much of the landscape of America remains untouched, even in modern times. You should keep a journal of your travels to go along with your photographs. Even if it's just a few notes at a time, they will all add up as you keep writing. Something I've mentioned before is that I get a unique feeling from each trail or park I visit. It's not just that they look different but that they have different "vibes", as if each place is trying to tell you it's story. At your favorite parks, if you think of the land as a neighborhood, and all of the trees, plants and rocks as the "people who live there", and then you consider that most of the time they are alone with themselves, then you can imagine that each "town" (park) develops it's own character based on the personalities who live there. I have a thing about what constitutes "people", haha, and in nature I consider everything to be a person, even rocks and even light and shade, lol. I sense vibes in the way shadows are cast, as if there might be spirits inside, and to that extent I can point out special places in each park, like a hollow or a canopy of trees, where it feels like the presence is especially pronounced. You know how psychics talk about a haunted house, and how they can feel "cold spots", or rooms where something bad happened? What I am talking about is the opposite of that. You can go to a park, and while the whole place is wonderful, you can notice certain isolated spots, often having to do with light and shade, where the feeling is especially good. And that's because of the spirits too, I think, except in this case they are always good spirits. :)
Tonight I watched a movie called "The Neanderthal Man"(1953), starring Robert Shayne as a Mad Scientist who is experimenting with reverse evolution. The setting is the High Sierras, and as the movie opens, a hunter is describing an encounter with a Ferocious Beast to the patrons of a country bar. "I swear, it was three times the size of a regular tiger, and it had tusks like an elephant"! The poor guy is scared to death, but the bartender only scoffs : "Y'know, I'm from Texas where we're used to Tall Tales, but yours tops anything I've ever heard. A giant-sized tiger.......ha!.........and with tusks. You oughta cut back on the whiskey before you go on a hunt'".
Among those present at the bar that night is the local Game Warden (Robert Long), who also thinks the story ridiculous, but as he is driving home, an Enormous Feline pounces on the hood of his car before running off into the darkness. The next day a rancher complains that some of his sheep have been killed. The Game Warden goes to the ranch to investigate and finds an oversized footprint, shaped like a cat's. He makes a plaster mold of it, then drives to Los Angeles to show the cast to zoologist Ross Harkness (Richard Crane). In the movie's best scene, Dr. Harkness - feeling his intelligence insulted by the Game Warden's suggestion that a Saber-Tooth Tiger may be on the loose - excoriates the Warden in a diatribe of Precise Science-speak that rivals anything we've heard from the Formal Aliens in their exacting use of the English language. The Warden is humbled by the more knowledgeable Zoologist, but sticks to his guns about what he witnessed. "Besides, look at that footprint", he offers. "If nothing else, the thing's huge, much bigger than a normal tiger".
Notwithstanding the fact that there aren't any tigers on North American soil, the footprint is finally enough to convince Harkness to accompany the Warden back to the mountains, to search for the elusive creature.
Now we cut to a meeting of scientists, also being held in Los Angeles. "Professor Groves" (Shayne) is making a presentation to the esteemed group, in which he points out the steady increase in brain size in early homonids, culminating in the large brain of the Neanderthal Man. "But what happens after that"?, he asks rhetorically. Pointing to the next brain on his chart, he states, "As you can see, for the first time, in modern man, the brain decreases in size. Thus my proposal that Neanderthal was superior in intelligence"!
The room erupts into argument. Groves is denounced by every man present, some even stooping to ridicule him personally. The fierceness of the attack angers Groves. He in turn lambastes the group as lightweights and charlatans. Storming out of the meeting, he vows to prove himself right.
Up north at the ranch, the zoologist and the game warden have staked out a spot in the woods where a dead deer has been found. They're armed and waiting for the tiger to return. When it does, they blast away and kill it. Sure enough, it's enormous and has tusk-like teeth. "A Sabertooth, extinct for a million years"!, says Harkness. "By all rights this should be an impossibility". But they're staring right at it, so it isn't.
Harkness goes to the bar to talk to the hunter who saw it first. While there, he meets "Ruth Marshall" (Doris Merrick), whose car has broken down. Harkness offers her a ride, and it just so happens that she's the fiancee of Professor Groves.
Harkness ends up staying at the home of Groves, who doesn't want him there but is overruled by his fiancee. Having seen the Sabertooth with his own eyes, Harkness knows something strange is going on. The Professor has a deaf-mute girl working as his servant. She seems very agitated by Harkness' presence also. It's as if they don't want a zoologist poking around, haha. Now, keep in mind that the Professor is out to prove his scientific colleagues wrong. To do that, he will begin experimenting on himself, to demonstrate the superiority of the Neanderthal brain. Right around this time, a series of murders take place in the area. One victim escapes. She is a barmaid (played by Beverly Garland of "The Alligator People" and "Decoy") who describes a "horrible, ugly looking man" who had the face and strength of a gorilla. Who could this Wild Man be? When we last saw the Professor, he was giving himself an injection of some sort. Hmmm.
Harkness decides to snoop around the house when the Professor is out. Inside the lab, he finds a series of photographs of the deaf-mute servant, in which she appears to regress to a pre-modern genetic state. In other words, she ends up looking like a Cave Woman. He presents these photographs to the Professor's fiance, who is stunned but proclaims ignorance of such goings-on. Not so his daughter, who was aware of her father's de-evolutionary experiments on cats, but had no idea he'd ever created a Sabertooth Tiger let alone a Neanderthal Woman. And now he's done it again - to himself!
"The Neanderthal Man" has similarities to "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde", as Groves changes back and forth from Stone Age Savage to Modern Academic. Furthermore, even though he's stopped the injections, the changeovers continue. He's doomed to turn Neanderthal, and it's not as he imagined it would be. Instead of developing superior intelligence, as he predicted to his peers, he becomes a grunting murderer. It's a good plot, with the subtheme of "devo-lution", but director E.A. Dupont doesn't take it anywhere. After blazing the trail with those great opening scenes (the ones with the ultra-precise dialogue), Dupont allows the story to peter out, and we end up with Groves running around the mountainside wearing a wolfman mask and strangling people. All the interesting science goes to waste.
I still give "The Neanderthal Man" Two Regular Thumbs Up, because of the two aforementioned scenes, but the rest of the film is only passable at best. Still worth a view, however, for Richard Crane's portrayal of the zoologist. //////
That's all for the moment. I know I missed writing to you yesterday, so my streak of daily blogging has finally come to an end after about sixty in a row. Not bad, eh? I'm trying to adjust back to writing while at work, which I did for many years, so if I did it before I can do it again. See you later tonight.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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