One Million Years BC (1966) Harryhausen, Dinosaurs and the legendary bikini (Review)

If you’re a man of a certain age who remembers getting strange feelings when their parents let them watch the dinosaur movie on TV, then you already know whether or not you should buy StudioCanal’s Blu-Ray of One Million Years B.C. Don Chaffey’s film has an iconic stature for a particular generation, only reinforced when the familiar poster of Raquel Welch as Loana appeared in Andy Dufresne’s cell in The Shawshank Redemption. For the rest of us, what does the first entry into Hammer’s prehistoric cycle have to offer?

Well, it has Ray Harryhausen’s Dynamation, although it doesn’t quite have enough of it. Harryhausen, a genuine poet whose effects are as important to cinema history as the work of any actor or director, taught himself stop-frame animation after seeing King Kong. His first project was a self-financed film called Evolution of the World which he never completed, but a finished clip of fighting dinosaurs was enough to get him a job at George Pal’s production studio. The rampaging extinct animals of One Million Years B.C. hark back to this formative project, except here Harryhausen was completely aware he wasn’t shooting for paleontological accuracy. In this film set in the Pleistocene era, the cave people face off against Allosaurs (Jurassic era), Pteranodons (Cretaceous), warthogs (er, modern) and giant tarantulas (hang on, what?).

So the film’s tagline, “This is the way it was”, isn’t accurate – unless they mean the way it was in 1940, when the father and son team of Hal Roach and Hal Roach Jr. directed One Million B.C. Chaffey’s film is an acknowledged remake, sharing character names and some of the most memorable set-pieces. An early scene in One Million Years B.C., where John Richardson’s Tumak is pursued by what is very clearly a superimposed iguana, might be a cute nod to the less-than-persuasive special effects of the earlier film. It’s certainly a rude awakening after the pre-credits sequence, whose excellent, atmospheric pre-CGI zoom in on the Earth from space actually recalls the creation of Earth sequence in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

The rest of One Million Years B.C.’s cinematic ancestors and descendants are a lot more earthy than that. Loana’s tribe are introduced splashing around in the sea wearing skimpy furs, a PG-certificate echo of the nudist camp films that provided British and American audiences with their only glimpses of flesh in the 1950s and early 60s. Those movies tried to ward off accusations of prurience by stressing the innocent, carefree qualities of the naturist lifestyle; Hammer, never a studio to do things by halves, took that argument to its logical conclusion by taking audiences back to a time before civilisation and its taboos.

Despite that licence, One Million Years B.C. isn’t as transgressive as you may expect from the studio that brought gore to British cinema. It’s an innocent world, and its cave people with their gleaming teeth and hearty laughs seem to be living an enviable life compared to their brethren in Hammer’s later prehistoric films. Creatures the World Forgot has an attempted rape, and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth – based on a parody script by none other than J.G. Ballard that was hastily stripped of its jokes when Hammer needed another straight-faced cave-woman film – had nudity and some nastier dinosaurs. One Million Years B.C. could have done with more of the latter; the stretches of cave-people power struggles in between the dinosaur attacks can get fairly dry.

The saving grace of these scenes is Welch, who despite her initial disdain for the project gives the role her all. She has real star presence and delivers ug-ug dialogue like “Ahot Loana eehm?” as if it really means something. It’s to Studiocanal’s credit that they actually get an interview with her on the disc, as well as one with her co-star Martine Beswick. The real pleasure of this new Blu-Ray is the showcase it gives to Wilkie Cooper’s cinematography, though. Cooper frequently shot films with Harryhausen, the animator trusting him with the unique technical challenges of his work. Like Cooper and Harryhausen’s earlier collaboration Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years B.C. has a charming, brightly coloured, sun-baked look that matches the child-like glee of Harryhausen’s technique. Most of One Million Years B.C.’s pleasures are very simple ones, but watching Harryhausen’s brontosaurus rear its neck across Cooper’s blue sky is the one that feels transcendent.

Thanks for reading our review of One Million Years BC

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