I briefly wrote about E.A. Dupont’s THE NEANDERTHAL MAN (1953) as part of my neverending quest to see every film depicted in Denis Gifford’s seminal Pictorial History of Horror Movies, but I didn’t do justice to either its awfulness or its strangeness.
I don’t know whether to hope that Dupont didn’t realise how terrible the Pollexfen-Wisberg script was, with which he is saddled (in which case we would have to place him in steep cognitive decline) or to hope that he DID realise (in which case he must have been truly miserable making this). I also don’t know if he had any uncredited story input. I hope not.
Jack Pollexfen & Aubrey Wisberg gave us the endearing MAN FROM PLANET X and the less-endearing DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL. They definitely have a distinctive take on genre cinema. Their most sadistic stuff is this and the kiddie adventure RETURN TO TREASURE ISLAND, which weirdly feels like a Jean Rollin movie. Inappropriate, you might say.
The fate of Beverly Garland, dragged into the bushes and, it’s clear, raped by the ape-man, is a sordid first for fifties monster cinema, though the likes of INGAGI and of course KONG had more than suggested bestiality before. we still had the Ed Wood-scripted THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST to look forward to. Refreshingly, I guess, Garland survives.
The film is occasionally good-looking — Dupont always seems to have insisted on talented cameramen and here he has Stanley Cortez, of all people. I wonder how Cortez, who Welles found slow compared to Gregg Toland, adapted to B-pictures like this and SHOCK CORRIDOR.
Dupont, who gave us the unchained camera, is pretty much weighted down like Marley’s ghost here, so what impact the film has derives from one stolid composition being planted on top of another.
One problem with B-movie writers, an aspect of their usual badness, is that they keep writing things that couldn’t be done well even on an A-budget. Hence all those rubber bats in vampire movies. It is perfectly possible to do without them. Here, Pollexfen & Wisberg have supplied a doable caveman, but also a sabre tooth tiger. I don’t know if anyone on the crew tried glueing tusks to a tiger, or how many limbs they lost trying it, but I do know that in the end Dupont opted for a real tiger in wide shots and a hilarious plush toy stand-in for the fanged close-ups:
I’d certainly react like that if someone threw a cuddly toy at my windshield. The trick is kind of the reverse of the ’32 RUE MORGUE’s swapping between a man in an ape suit in l.s. and a real chimp in c.u. That was better.
There are some attractive scenic shots without actors, but most of the action is stagebound. Cortez makes it look somewhat convincing and extremely attractive —
Some of this surprising effectiveness is down to good background plates, but these are enhanced by the placement of foreground foliage so you don’t see ’em too clearly.
The shadows of better films — Mamoulian’s JEKYLL already did the alter ego as primitive man bit — ALTERED STATES would virtually remake this to excellent effect — falls over this film, but it’s the movie’s own lousiness that eclipses whatever virtues it has.
As with Ed Wood, you get the sense of an embittered would-be genius ventriloquising through the characters, particularly when Robert Shayne’s mad scientist tries to persuade a roomful of rhubarbing fogeys of his revolutionary evolutionary and devolutionary theories. “Why does nobody appreciate me?” is the subtext, even as the surtext is lines like “Let me assure you for want of your own understanding…” Obnoxious gibberish. (“Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”)
If anyone involved in this hairy farrago had a right to feel like that, it was surely Dupont.
The transformation scene mainly makes use of cutaways to a yowling caged cat (soon to become a sabretooth — would that the film attempted to show THAT metamorphosis) while various makeup stages are applied, but right at the start there’s a brief bit of the Mamoulian lighting trick, enabling Shayne to glance about as shading and pencilled “hairs” fade into view on his kisser. Sparing him the need to be pinned in position like Lon Chaney Jr.
And then, alas —
THE NEANDERTHAL MAN is a grotesque tragedy — sort of like if Hamlet inadvertently broke wind midway through “The rest is silence.” No, that’s wrong. It’s like if a couple of phrases of Shakespeare somehow slipped into a 78 minute cavalcade of flatulence.
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