Robert Shayne

The movie opens with a scene of a cabin in a rural scrub land mountain area with pine trees. Credits Roll. We are told we are in the California High Sierra mountains. Prof. Clifford Groves (Robert Shayne), an anthropologist, is working at his desk when he is startled by a roar and a crash in another room in the house. He enters his lab only to find the window broken and the room a shambles. His daughter, Jan (Joyce Terry) is also drawn to the lab by the earlier commotion. He is very cross with her. He grabs his hat and coat and leaves. A hunter, Mr. Wheeler (Frank Gerstle), spots a tiger in a meadow, arms himself with a rifle and walks off. Later he recounts his discovery at Webb's Café, the local meeting spot and watering hole. Danny (Robert Easton) and the owner Charlie Webb (Lee Morgan) think he's either drunk or a liar. What he describes is an extinct saber-toothed tiger. George Oakes (Robert Long) comes into the café and is introduced as the local game warden. Wheeler tells Oakes his story. Oakes is driving home when the tiger jumps on his moving car. He pulls out his revolver and fires at it. He resumes his drive home and encounters Prof. Groves and asks if he's spotted anything unusual. No is the reply. The next morning, Oakes and Sheriff Andy Andrews (Dick Rich) drive out to the woods and spot the tracks of what the sheriff thinks is a very large mountain lion. They take a moulage plaster cast of the print. Back in the Sheriff's office they try to identify the print. A local rancher, Tim Newcomb (Robert Bray), comes in and reports the death of another of his cows. This is the fourth in less than a week. Oakes drives down to Los Angeles to talk to Dr. Ross Harkness (Richard Crane). Harkness thinks the plaster cast is a model; he is surprised to find that Oakes made it from a real footprint. He says it is a large cat, but is incredulous when told it has tusks. He says the only cat with tusks was the saber-toothed tiger--long extinct. The two get into an argument, but ultimately Harkness agrees to pay the area a visit. At Webb's Café, Nola Mason (Beverly Garland) is pouring a cup of coffee for a customer. Harkness asks Nola the whereabouts of George Oakes. Danny tells him Oakes is out in the mountains. Nola introduces Harkness to Ruth Marshall (Doris Merrick). She and Prof. Groves are engaged to be married. Nola tells Harkness that Ruth is stuck, car trouble, and asks if Harkness can drive her out to the Groves place. Harkness agrees. At the house we learn that Groves is in Los Angeles and Oakes will not be back from the High Country until tomorrow. Harkness is invited to spend the night. Groves is lecturing at the Naturalist Society meeting in Los Angeles. His presentation on comparative brain sizes isn't going as well as he hoped. The members don't seem too receptive to his hypothesis. He is continually chided by a colleague (Anthony Jochim). He is very rude with his responses, so much so that the conference chairman (Marshall Bradford) asks Groves to conduct himself in a more professional manner. Groves goes on a personally insulting rant and the meeting is prematurely adjourned, with Groves being told never to attend again. At the Groves home, Ruth, Dr. Ross Harkness and Jan Groves are having coffee. It is late and they are ready to turn in. Jan introduces Celia, the housekeeper (Tandra Quinn). She explains that Celia is a deaf/mute, and will show them their rooms. Groves gets back home early the next morning. He goes straight to his lab. We hear a cat meowing. Groves fills a syringe and injects the cat. Jan, Ruth and Ross meet at the breakfast table the next morning. Groves wanders in, preoccupied, but does notice Harkness. He is very rude to Harkness. Oakes stops in to pick up his car and tells Harkness there has been another incident with the cat. Oakes and Harkness drive off, well armed, into the woods. They find the remains of a deer and decide to wait until the cat returns. They shoot the cat when it returns. Harkness barely believes his own eyes--it is an extinct saber-toothed cat. Harkness and Oakes return to the Groves place. They ask Groves to accompany them back to witness the cat they killed. Groves thinks it is a joke. Reluctantly he agrees to go, but when they arrive the cat is missing. Groves is in his lab when his fiancé, Ruth, enters. She's spoiling for a confrontation and she has it out with Groves. She tells him he's ruining his health and heading for a nervous breakdown. He tells Ruth about his research on reactivating dormant cells of earlier species. They get into an argument, and he tells her to leave and she does. She stays in a cabin next to Webb's Café. Groves decides to inject himself with his own formula. Twenty minutes later he is sweating profusely, then begins to transform. His hands become hairy and his nails become like claws. He resembles a Neanderthal. He opens the lab window and exits. He wanders around the woods. A hunter out bagging rabbits encounters the Neanderthal. It attacks the hunter, then attacks and kills his dog. Groves as the Neanderthal returns to the lab. He lets himself back in through the window. He transforms back into a modern human. The Sheriff stops by the Groves house that evening. He asks if the professor is in. He tells Jan and Harkness he is forming a posse in the morning. A local Rancher, Tim Newcomb, was murdered. Prof. Groves enters the room, but claims ill health in refusing to join the posse. In his room Groves reviews the notes in his journal. He reads that he injected himself and transformed in twenty-five minutes. Reconversion took almost an hour. Without an inject he starts to regress into his primitive self. He leaves the house and wanders the woods again. Harkness exits the house and enters the lab through the open window. He closes the shade and turns on the light. He pulls a plate from a camera and develops the negative. Celia enters the lab and feeds the cat. Harkness looks at the negative and sees the saber-toothed cat in the image. He finds additional photos, some of Celia in transformation. He takes the photos with him. Nola is out on a picnic with Buck Hastings (Eric Colman). He is taking pictures of her. The Neanderthal attacks and kills Buck. Nola witnesses the attack. When she goes to help Buck, it returns and carries her away. Oakes calls the Groves home to tell them Buck Hastings, who works for the forestry station, was murdered this morning. Celia spots Nola outside and Harkness carries her into the house. She tries to describe the Neanderthal but is obviously in a state of shock. Harkness asks Jan about her father's work and Celia's participation. They meet in the lab. He questions Celia through Jan via sign language. When she denies ever being a test subject he shows her the pictures--it shows Celia in various stages of transformation into a Neanderthal. He injects a cat with the formula. The doorbell rings and they meet with Dr. Fairchild (William Fawcett). He came to see and treat Nola. The doctor leaves, then they hear a crashing sound. The cat's cage is smashed, and the lab a mess. The window is broken and they see a tiger wandering off into the woods. Jan concludes that the murderer is the transformed version of her father. She reads his journal and discovers he's been experimenting on himself. The posse and police are out searching for the Neanderthal Man. They find and shoot him, but only manage to wound him. Harkness and Jan drive to Webb's café. They suspect the Neanderthal will stop there looking for Ruth. It attacks Charlie Webb. He is injured, but not too seriously. Harkness and Jan arrive to find him being patched up. They notice that Ruth's door had been broken down. The next morning Dr. Fairchild stops at the Groves house to take Nola home. He tells them that the Neanderthal and Ruth are holed up in a cave near South Ridge. The pair exit the cave. Ruth begs the posse not to shoot. It escapes into the woods, but encounters the saber-toothed cat Harkness created. The cat attacks the Neanderthal Man. He puts up a good fight, and the posse kills the cat. Groves, still in his primitive guise, is brought back to the house. He is mortally wounded but still alive. Harkness explains what happened to Ruth, Jan, Oakes and the Sheriff. Groves transforms back into modern human form in his bed. Just before he dies he says, "Better this way."

Gene protects young Larry Evans, wrongly accused of murder, while trying to find the real badguys. The only Gene Autry film where the leading lady, Barbara Britton, is equally billed above the title as the co-star, thereby knocking his horse Champion out of the honors, if one chooses to overlook the 1941 novelty from 20th Century-Fox that had Jane Withers and Gene Autry above the title in that order. This Autry entry has Larry Evans, whose gun had been used to kill rancher Ed Norton in a poker game, escaping a lynching party headed by ranchers Dave Randall and Bill Otis. Norton's friend Gene Autry, investigating on his own, discovers that Larry's gun had been put in the poker pot with the chips, after Larry had lost all of his money, and anyone could have used it when the lights went out. He finds Larry and his sister Mary Evans in a hideaway, and sends Mary back to town and hides Larry in the cabin of miner Jim Hedge. Finding out that Randall and Don Mason have tried to buy the Evans ranch, Gene decides to take a look at it. Hedge shows up and says he can't figure out what could be on the ranch that would be worth committing murder for. The needle on Hedge's compass begins to spin madly but before Gene can question the miner, Sheriff Cramer arrives and arrests Larry. Gene persuades Cramer to gather all the players in the murder-game together to re-enact the crime, with Gene taking Norton's chair and with Larry's gun on the table. Gene tells the assembled players he knows who killed Norton and why, and the lights go out and a shot is fired at Gene. The latter, who didn't ride into town on a turnip truck, has filled Larry's gun with blanks and covered the handle with graphite. —Les Adams <longhorn1939@suddenlink.net> When the lights go out at the craps table a man is killed with Larry Evans' gun. Gene thinks he is innocent and hides him from the law. To find the real killer Autry re-enacts the crime. This time the lights go out again and a shot is fired at Autry. —Maurice VanAuken <mvanauken@a1access.net>

A food writer who has lied about being the perfect housewife must try to cover her deception when her boss and a returning war hero invite themselves to her home for a traditional family Christmas. Journalist Elizabeth Lane is one of the country's most famous food writers. In her columns, she describes herself as a hard working farm woman, taking care of her children and being an excellent cook. But this is all lies. In reality she is an unmarried New Yorker who can't even boil an egg. The recipes come from her good friend Felix. The owner of the magazine she works for has decided that a heroic sailor will spend his Christmas on *her* farm. Miss Lane knows that her career is over if the truth comes out, but what can she do? —Mattias Thuresson In her Smart Housekeeping column, Elizabeth Lane provides amazing recipes and homemaking hints. However, Elizabeth's got a little secret: SHE needs a recipe to boil water! Elizabeth has no cooking skills, no Connecticut farm, no adoring hubby and no baby-makes-three as suggested in her column. Something her boss, the magazine publisher, doesn't know when he decides to invite himself and a recently returned war hero to her home for a traditional family Christmas. Watch as Elizabeth tries to be a good wife and doting mother, with absolutely NO experience. —Carolyn Weiss The destroyer of Jefferson Jones and his partner Sinkewicz is sunk by the Germans and they float adrift in a raft for eighteen days. When they are rescued, they are sent to a hospital and Jefferson has to follow a stringent diet imposed by the doctors. He seduces his nurse expecting to get solid food and she decides to write to Alexander Yardley, who is the owner of the Smart Housekeeping magazine where the famous journalist Elizabeth Lane writes a column about recipes and food, asking him to allow Jefferson to spend Christmas with Elizabeth and her family in her farm in Connecticut. The prepotent Yardley sees the chance of free promotion of his magazine and forces Elizabeth to invite the hero Jones. However, Elizabeth is single, does not have a baby and lives alone in a small apartment in New York and she made-up a perfect married life for her fans. Further, she does not how to cook and the recipes belong to her Hungarian friend Felix Bassenak, who owns a restaurant in New York. The architect John Sloan, who has been wooing Elizabeth for a long, proposes to marry her in his farm in Connecticut and she brings Felix with her to help to proceed the farce. The things get complicated when Yardley also decides to spend Christmas with Elizabeth while she falls in love with Jones. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Elizabeth Lane is the perfect homemaker in so many ways. She's an outstanding cook and interior decorator who lives in a beautiful house in the countryside, is happily married and recently had a baby - as her regular column in Smart Housekeeping magazine recounts to her wide readership. There's only one big catch: she isn't any of those things - she can't cook, doesn't know the first thing about decorating and lives in a tiny, dingy apartment. It all begins to unravel when her publisher, Alexander Yardley, arranges for recently rescued sailor Jefferson Jones to spend the weekend at Lane's country home. To top it off, Yardley invites himself to spend the weekend there as well. Elizabeth scrambles, getting her friend Felix Bassenak to cook for her and borrows her friend John Sloan's country house. She even gets a baby from a neighbor. As if she doesn't have enough to deal with, she and Jones become quite attracted to one another. Somehow it all works out in the end. —garykmcd