by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The third film on last night’s Turner Classic Movies
marathon of films featuring stop-motion animation — co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz
and Travis Knight, modern-day stop-motion practitioner and director of last
year’s film Kubo and the Two Strings
(and son of Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight, which means he never had to
struggle as an artist or rent space in a crumbling old firetrap like the
victims of the recent fire in Oakland) — was another Ray Harryhausen
production, or at least a movie he was involved in: One Million Years
B.C., a 1966 Hammer Studios remake of the
1940 film One Million, B.C. that
Hal Roach not only produced but also co-directed with his son, Hal Roach, Jr.
The 1940 original made a star of Victor Mature in the role of Tumak, one of two
sons of the chief of the Rock People, who has a fight with his brother, is
driven out of the Rock People’s caves and ends up on the beach with the Shell
People, where he’s discovered by and falls in love with Loana (played by Carole
Landis in the original and by Raquel Welch in the remake that became her star-making vehicle — for years teenage boys hung huge
posters of Welch in her scanty fur cave-girl costume, with as much of her
breasts showing as they could get away with during the long, slow death of the
Production Code, and you can guess what many of these boys were doing and
thinking of as they gazed at Raquel’s huge image). Along the way, in both
versions, the cave people encountered living dinosaurs and other monstrous
creatures that may have really existed on Earth but not at the same time humans did — though, as I joked to
Charles when he arrived home in mid-movie and he pointed that out, a “creation
scientist” would believe in this
movie! In their book The Golden Turkey Awards, in which they named Mature and Welch among the
worst actors of all time, Harry and Michael Medved wrote, “It is no coincidence that Victor Mature and Raquel Welch …
started their careers in different versions of this prehistoric saga. Playing a
caveman demands a minimum of verbal mastery and dramatic subtlety while
affording a maximum opportunity for display of the male or female Body
Beautiful in skimpy, cunningly designed fur costumes.”
The “minimum of verbal
mastery and dramatic subtlety” was predetermined by a mistake Hal Roach made in
the original version and which the makers of this one, Hammer studio head
Michael Carreras (who not only personally produced the film but wrote its
script as well) and his chosen traffic cop — oops, I mean director — Don
Chaffey, all too faithfully followed. Roach had originally offered silent-era
veteran D. W. Griffith the job of co-directing One Million, B.C.
and Griffith, who in 1940 hadn’t made a film in nine years, eagerly accepted
the job in hopes it would be the route to a comeback. Then Roach and Griffith
had an argument over how the cave people would express themselves: Griffith
wanted them to speak recognizable English, while Roach wanted them to speak
gibberish that supposedly represented the cave people’s language. Griffith left
the project (sources differ on whether he quit or was fired), but when I
watched One Million, B.C. I wrote,
“Judging from the final film, Griffith was right: hearing the cave people
babble incomprehensibly in a made-up language the filmmakers didn’t bother to
subtitle gets annoying pretty quickly.” And if Griffith was right in 1940, he
was even more right in 1966 (even though by then he’d been dead for 18 years);
John Richardson, who I got the impression was probably a very talented British
actor given the right role (or at least one in which he could speak English or
any other recognizable human tongue!), had the unenviable task of fitting into
Victor Mature’s fur garments as the new Tumak. He tries to look interested in Raquel Welch but goes through the
whole role — when he isn’t running, hunting or fighting, which according to
this script seem to be the principal aspects of cave-man life (that and
committing gang rape — there’s the predictable sexist scene in which Richardson
has to save Welch’s virtue from all the horndogs among his fellow Rock tribe,
and just to make it sexist in both directions there’s an earlier scene on the
beach in which Richardson seems to be in danger of being gang-raped himself by
all the Shell girls) he goes through his entire role with a blank expression on
his face, as if he’s not all that sure what this boy-girl business is about. (Part
of that may be due to the fact that in the establishing scenes before
Richardson got thrown out of the Rock People for attacking his brother — and
seemingly killing him, though he turns up alive later — there appears to be
only one woman in the Rock tribe, and though she’s dark-haired and Raquel
Welch, at least in this movie, is blonde, she looks like she could give la
Welch considerable competition in the
mammary department.)
As with Clash of the Titans — but even more so, given that not only did Clash of
the Titans have more intrinsically
talented actors, they even got to speak English — One Million Years B.C. is really entertaining only when Ray Harryhausen’s creations take center stage. Though
the first scene with a dinosaur in it uses the usual cheap expedient that
became fashionable in the 1950’s — filming a living lizard in slow motion on
miniature sets and trying to pass it off as a dinosaur (Mankiewicz’s commentary
suggested that Harryhausen wanted a realistic opening shot before he brought in
the stop-motion, but I suspect this was done just to save money on the budget —
and it doesn’t work; despite the slow motion, the live lizard still moves too
quickly to have the ponderousness one would expect from a dinosaur) — but the
rest of the creatures, including a Brontosaurus, a Pterodactyl (who carries off
Raquel Welch in a scene that suggests Harryhausen was deliberately copying the
scene in which a Pterodactyl carries off Fay Wray in King Kong and Kong kills the flying dinosaur and rescues her), an
Allosaurus and a Triceratops — the last two have a big fight scene that is also
quite Kongian, as John Richardson and Raquel Welch watch it from behind trees
in a window-like setting to make the process work of combining humans and
animated models in the same frame easier), as well as a giant turtle which the
Shell People call “Achelon” (the actual scientific name of the animal — though
it didn’t co-exist with either dinosaurs or humans the Achelon turtle did exist, but under the constraints of a Hammer budget
Harryhausen wasn’t allowed to animate its hind legs, so he had to have it
emerge from water and not show its back end at all), are vivid, lifelike,
absolutely convincing and the only reason anyone today would want to watch this
movie (unless you’re a young straight boy who still thinks Raquel Welch is hot!). Part of me wishes that if
TCM were going to do a tribute to Ray Harryhausen, they should have picked his
best movies, Jason and the Argonauts
(whose story, like that of Clash of the Titans, is a cut-and-paste pastiche of Greek myths, but is a good deal stronger, more coherent
and a better match for Harryhausen’s spectacular visuals) and The Seventh
Voyage of Sinbad, but there was certainly
something to be said for showcasing these two much more rarely seen films —
especially One Million Years, B.C., in
which Raquel Welch’s posters were far more popular and widely circulated than
the actual film!
