One Million B.C. (1940)

I read about it on the book "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Screen" by Marc Shapiro. I saw it on Turner Classic Movies and I took a kick out of it. While the acting is great, the music is awesome, the sound effects are imaginative and the cinematography is wonderful, there is one mammoth problem (pun intended), the special effects. While I don't mind the men in dinosaur suits, the lizards, alligators and armadillos, whether they have horns and spikes glued on their bodies or not, and elephants with fur coats on their bodies look super fake. I know, audiences were not sophisticated back then as they are now, but hey, that was the 1940's. Who can not forget the infamous scene where the Dimetrodon and Lystrosaurs (or should I say, dwarf alligator with a fake fin on his back and tegu lizard) fight. In the years that followed, footage and outtakes from this movie was used in other movies (even in foreign films from countries like Turkey and India). That is bound to outrage the ASPCA. If Hal Roach had half a brain, he would let Willis O'Brien do the special effects and have dinosaurs that would look like dinosaurs and not just lizards with horns and spikes glued on their bodies. However, if the special effects were done by Willis O'Brien, it would be a whole lot better and there would be no 1966 remake with Ray Harryhausen's special effects (or would there?) On the plus side, the film did get an Oscar Nomination for Best Special Effects and Best Original Score. It was a big smash at the box-office. If I were you I recommend the remake because it is better than the original, but give the original a watch if you want to.

. . . the Adam & Eve Era, according to the best estimate of the Roman Authorities on such things. ONE MILLION B.C. is shot when Earth's human population was still all-White, made up of the blonde Shell People and the less advanced brunette Rock Folks. Blonde princess Loana introduces the Rockers to agriculture, jewelry, stone tools, table manners, and a brassiere technology that puts even the most modern lingerie of the 1930s to shame. Then the earthquakes that killed off the dinosaurs (all but one got sucked down cracks into the Abyss due to the Law of Gravity acting upon their excessive body mass) destroys the Rockers' home cave. Unfortunately, the only surviving dinosaur has the Shell Sect pinned inside THEIR own grotto, with no access to the bounty of their fields and orchards. Fortuitously, the Endangered Species Act hasn't been passed yet, so the domesticated Rockers bury this Last Dino Standing under a rock slide, and everyone lives as happily afterwards as can be expected for a gang of citizens at least 49,700 generations away from being able to exercise their Second Amendment Rights when Danger looms.

I see where Lon Chaney Jr. made this picture right after the Oscar nominated picture "Of Mice and Men" in 1939. Talk about a reversal of fortune.So gee, where to start. Probably the best thing this picture has to offer is the faux dinosaur battle between the tricked out alligator and the spotted lizard some way into the picture. I love the way these old flicks took ordinary animals and made it look like they were monstrous dinosaurs. Also can't forget how patching up your ordinary every day elephant with a mohair suit qualified them as woolly mammoths and mastodons.You know, those prehistoric cavemen were a hardy bunch weren't they? When Tumak (Victor Mature) went over the cliff in his battle with Akhoba (Chaney) he should have been a goner, don't you think? Instead, he just brushes himself off long enough to get sideswiped into a river by one of those mammoths. That might have been bad news if he hadn't run into Loana (Carole Landis) of the Shell People. Loana spends some time teaching Tumak the benefits of sharing food and even introduces him to the folks once she figures he might be a handy guy to have around.What struck me was how a hardy bunch like the Rock People didn't have their own spear tips fashioned from stone or how they hadn't caught on to the concept of fire, even though they lived a mere stone's throw up river from the Shell folks. Oh well, no use wondering about such things when so much other zany stuff was going on. Like Tumak wrestling a mini-triceratops or teaching the youngsters at the Shell camp how to shake apples out of a tree.The finale was pretty exciting and I couldn't believe the scene where the fleeing cave-girl got smothered by the lava pouring out of the volcano. The rock slide that killed the big lizard was thrilling too, but I did have to wonder why agile creatures like iguanas couldn't avoid falling into those crevices when the ground started separating. But for 1940 I guess this was pretty amazing stuff, so who am I to judge.

I first saw this movie on black-and-white TV as a 10-year-old kid. I loved the prehistoric animals and the musical score. Later in life I looked up the composer, Werner Heymann. He was one of many artists who fled to Hollywood from the Nazi threat in Europe. His lush romantic score reveals the influence of 19th-century Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. As for the Nazis, the film can be seen in part as an allegory of the dangers of Nazi brutality (represented by the Rock People) versus the civilizing influence of the Shell People, who represent western liberal democracy. I don't want to push this level too hard, but it is there. If the story seems a bit silly, that is part of its charm to me.