The Caveman

In the height of the Jazz Age, Myra Wray, a socialite suffocating under the weight of her own privilege and boredom, decides to treat the world like a laboratory. On a whim, she takes a one-hundred-dollar bill—a small fortune in 1926—and shears it in two. On one half, she scrawls her address and an invitation to a game of chance, then flings it from her high-rise window into the urban chaos below. The 'winner' of this cynical lottery is Mike Smigget, a rugged coal truck driver who is as soot-stained as Myra is pristine. What begins as a cruel joke evolves into a Pygmalion-style social experiment as Myra attempts to scrub the coal dust off Mike and pass him off as a refined gentleman to her elitist circle. However, the 'caveman' proves to be more than a mere doll for her amusement, and the resulting friction between his raw honesty and her world's artifice creates a series of escalating social disasters that threaten to expose the emptiness of the upper crust.