One Million Years B.C. One Million Years B.C. Fox Home Entertainment 1966 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 91 100 min. / Street Date March 9, 2004 / 14.98 Starring Raquel Welch, John Richardson, Percy Herbert, Robert Brown, Martine Beswick Cinematography Wilkie Cooper Special visual effects Ray Harryhausen Art Direction Robert Jones Film Editor Tom Simpson Original Music Mario Nascimbene Written by Michael Carreras from a 1940 screenplay by George Baker Produced by Michael Carreras, Hal Roach, Aida Young Directed by Don Chaffey
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson The English film industry was at the top of its form in 1966, producing genre pictures and "swingin' London" movies that were exporting well to other countries. Hammer was continuing to provide horror films for American studios. With the rising tide of retro and campy entertainments, One Million Years B.C. was written up optimistically in the U.K.'s Monthly Film Bulletin as a tongue-in-cheek quasi-comedy of substantial wit. I don't know what the critics saw (or what condition they were in when they saw it), but Don Chaffey's turgid saga of cavemen foraging, feuding and battling dinosaurs is a dead serious remake of a 1940 Hal Roach oddity that probably holds the record for having been raided for stock footage more than any other Hollywood movie. The remake has a bigger claim to movie history - it was the showcase-debut for Raquel Welch, the blonde cave girl with the perfect 60's fur bikini. Synopsis: A power struggle for leadership of the Rock people results in the banishment of young Tumak (John Richardson). After wandering through the wilderness, he comes upon the more civilized beach camp of the Shell people. Enchanted by Shell maiden Loana (Raquel Welch), he begins to see the benefit of living less aggressively, and for a moment becomes a hero by defending the Shell camp from an invading Allosaurus. Tumak's uncivilized behavior results in his ouster from the beach tribe as well, but this time Loana decides to go with him. At least the movie is different. Hammer had been mired in formulaic, underbudgeted horror offerings for at least four years and this dinosaur epic was obviously a much bigger undertaking. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands lend an otherworldly quality lacking in any previous caveman tale. Instead of going its usual cheap route, Hammer also went out of its way to recruit a top effects expert Ray Harryhausen for the prehistoric scenes. This was perhaps the first time that a stop-motion animator was actually courted as star talent for a major film assignment. One Million Years B.C. is one of Ray Harryhausen's most attractive pictures but it's also one that's hard to re-watch. Looking for additional subtleties in the plot or characters is fruitless. More than half of the picture is concerned with motley groups of Rock people hunting wild goats, or our heroes wandering amid the admittedly breath-taking scenery. Besides ogling Raquel Welch's fur bikini, there isn't much to really get excited about outside of the special effects. John Richardson is handsome but too dull-witted, although he does learn to miss his beach bunny girlfriend when a pteranodon plucks her away. There are hints of possible insights about mis-matched cultures, but nothing develops. The plotting continually reverts to Hal Roach logic: whenever something threatens to become a real scene, a dinosaur or a natural disaster will interrupt it. Some monkey men appear for decorative purposes, but the lack of any scientific basis for what we're seeing - man and dinosaurs never co-existed - pre-empts any musings about the Dawn of Man. Stanley Kubrick would address that issue a couple of years later. Percy Herbert was in Mysterious Island and returns here to play Tumak's greedy brother. He doesn't try to do a southern accent this time, however. Teenage James Bond fans immediately recognized Martine Beswick from From Russia with Love and Thunderball. Her hungry looks and aggressive attitude distinguish all of her roles. Harryhausen had only made one straight-out dinosaur feature, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and the rather patchy segment from Irwin Allen's The Animal World. Since then he had animated a score of fantasy pictures featuring monsters that appeared at regular intervals, like vaudeville routines. The most disappointing thing about One Million Years B.C. is that the dino sequences, although given a new technical polish, were all too similar to scenes from The Lost World of 40 years before. Monsters fight and kill each other while the humans look on from the sidelines. Harryhausen added his impressive illusions of contact via spears and rocks, but even though some of the beasts are interesting - a pleasantly benign Archelon sea turtle is allowed the Harryhausen rarity of not being killed - the formula isn't much different. Many stop motion sequences look rushed, with a brontosaurus foolishly composited in such a way as to make it look half a mile long. A lizard and an unlikely spider were very possibly substitutions for animation scenes Ray didn't have time to complete. I wouldn't be surprised if Hammer just couldn't wait for Harryhausen to finish his usual months of post-production work. The really stunning exception to the above (and given a handy chapter stop on this DVD) is the Allosaurus attack. In one of the film's few bright spots, Tumak is just beginning to acculturate himself to Shell ways when the Allosaurus jumps into the camp, threatens a child in a tree (a situation lifted straight from the 1940 original) and proceeds to chomp down on luckless cavemen. The monster is alert, mean-looking and spry, and Harryhausen's direction of the action is truly exciting. In one nice moment, the Allosaurus nimbly lifts a spear out of an attacker's grasp, as if saying, "This thing hurts. Let's just put it over here where you can't reach it." A very nice trucking composite shows the cavemen making the dinosaur back-pedal to the right, away from the points of their spears. The fight is more dynamic than normal because the Allosaurus isn't all that much bigger than the cavemen - it's a fair contest. The technical precision makes the scene some of Harryhausen's best work. The Allosaurus moves like Gwangi, but the model is more detailed - this creature has nicely culpted foreclaws instead of Gwangi's little flippers. I like to think that Ray wasn't able to ever get the dinos out of his system, and that the work-for-hire One Million Years B.C. whet his appetite to go do a Dino-Rama spectacle of his own. After the fairly painful scenes of volcanoes and earthquakes in Harryhausen's Mysterious Island, this saga wraps up with a truly good eruption. Rocks stab up out of the ground, rivers of lava gush out of a mountain, and cavemen topple from a landscape that's breaking up like an ice floe. An iguana is dumbly included in the proceedings, but the sodium-vapor insertion of foreground action into miniature sets is terrific. One shot of some cavemen being hit by falling boulders was cribbed by Stanley Kubrick for a montage in his A Clockwork Orange. In terms of technical polish, it's a high point for both Harryhausen and Hammer. The final shots show the volcanic survivors staggering together in B&W. Director Don Chaffey must have dropped the color to give us a style change for the curtain, but the effect is rather ironic. The monochrome makes it seem that man's prehistory is ready to advance to the next step - B&W silent comedies with Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton! Fox's DVD of One Million Years B.C. is sort of a disappointment. The transfer, color and audio are all better than reasonable, and Mario Nascimbene's wailing score comes across just fine. But we were all expecting to see the 100 minute English original version that had premiered on laserdisc in 1996. As reported in Video Watchdog, the missing nine minutes weren't just filler. Laser fans were delighted to see many new shots in the major dinosaur battles. Besides wondering why Fox trimmed them in the first place (why not shorten a couple of dumb caveman scenes instead?), now we have to puzzle the mystery of why Fox places a restoration demonstration on the disc that compares older tape transfers - including clips from a more complete version of the movie. The only extras are a pile of Fox promo trailers. It's too bad that Fox couldn't give One Million Years B.C. as nice of a DVD presentation as Myra Breckinridge, another title in this month's Raquel Welch promotion. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, One Million Years B.C. rates: Movie: Good Video: Very Good but a big disappointment, it's the short American version Sound: Very Good Supplements: Theatrical trailer, Restoration comparison Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: March 5, 2004 [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use