Word: aping
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...women alike were improvident, with little sense of the future, almost no memory of the past. The strongest male among them considered that all the women belonged to him, embraced them openly and frequently with the result that the weaker males were driven to sly and secret amours. These ape-men killed small animals, often went hungry, gorged themselves when they had food, froze in the winter, were among the earth's most hunted and vulnerable creatures...
Genesis and many a folk tale notwithstanding, most anthropologists have pictured primitive man as a little fellow somewhere between an ape and a monkey in size. But last week evidence was offered to prove Genesis correct. A Java geologist had dug up bones of prehistoric men bigger than the largest known apes...
...dwarfed even Meganthropus. Prowling in South China apothecaries' shops, whose drawers are often full of fossils, he found three astounding fossil teeth. They were six times as big as a modern man's molars, twice as big as a gorilla's. Koenigswald thought they were an ape's. But Weidenreich is sure, from the pattern of their "biting surfaces, that they are definitely human. He has named this man monster, who was certainly much larger than a gorilla, Gigantanthropus...
...Hairy Ape (United Artists), as Eugene O'Neill conceived him, was a one-man proletariat, a crude yet powerful symbol. A huge, half-demented ship's stoker, he was obsessed with the proud idea that he made the ship go, and ready to beat the brains out of anyone who attempted to gainsay him. He lost his mind when a slumming, crisply clad, attractive woman passenger, appalled (and excited) by his looks and language, recoiled and called him "the filthy beast!" At large ashore, he treated society much as an articulate King Kong might, and wound up in the killing...
Deprived of his bitter social implications, the Ape bums and blasts his way through a rudderless melodrama. Deprived of his ferocious eloquence, thanks doubtless to censorship, he talks like a tough guy who is trying not to shock his grandmother. Deprived of his tragic ending, he becomes, in retrospect, a not very convincing sailor ashore. Unfortunately, his screen creators have tried to compensate for these deficiencies by making him funny...