Barbra was forced to abandon it and run down the deserted road to a nearby, isolated two-story white farmhouse for refuge.The film""s screenplay (by Dorothy Yost and Mortimer Offner) was based on Jane Murfin""s adaptation of Booth Tarkington""s 1921 prize-winning novel of the same name about a girl in a mid-sized Indiana city.Gordon.The insane Nygma""s project was terminated, although he feverishly worked on it.Caught in his cubicle late at night by his angered supervisor Fred Stickley (Ed Begley, Jr.) and threatened with expulsion, he used Stickley as a guinea pig for his experiment on brain waves.When Stickley ordered him fired ("You demented, bizarre unethical toad! It is brain manipulation"), Nygma pushed Fred (still wearing the intelligence-sucking head contraption) in his swivel chair through the side window to his eventual death ("You are fired, or should I say terminated?"), while grabbing the device from his head at the last minute.]After several years of a mysterious absence following he Civil War, loner and war veteran Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) suddenly appears with no explanation (where has he been?), returning on horseback o his estranged brother Aaron Edwards"" family, living on a solitary, Texas frontier farm.