Hammer really pushed the boat out for the first of their trio of films set in prehistoric times, claiming in publicity that it was their 100th feature film (it wasn’t) and placing imported American star Raquel Welch – who had just finished shooting Richard Fleischer’s science fiction film Fantastic Voyage and the following year would appear as Lust in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled opposite Peter Cook and Dudley Moore – front and centre in her soon-to-be-iconic doe hide and fur bikini designed by Carl Toms. The promotional photograph of her in costume becoming a best-selling poster and helped to cement her image as a sex symbol though one bizarre product of the promotional photo-shoot that helped launch the film was a shot of Welch, in full costume, hanging serenely from a cross, a shot that appears nowhere in the finished film and which seemed designed solely to catch attention from the press. All of this was in support of a very silly but hugely enjoyable romp that remade Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. (1940) with dinosaurs mainly designed and animated by the master of stop motion, Ray Harryhausen.
You’ll remember this one from your childhoods – it was highly likely one of the first Hammer films you ever saw, and you probably saw it several times. Not a film for the serious minded geologist or anthropologist its’ set, like the original film, in an alternate past where humans and dinosaurs co-existed. One dark-haired tribe is led by Akhoba (Robert Brown) who clashes with his son Tumak (John Richardson) over the spoils after they kill and roast a warthog. Tumak is banished from the tribe and wanders off into the surrounding desert, encountering giant animals, huge lizards, and a tribe of less-advanced ape men. Finally exhausted a close to death, he reaches the coast and collapse on a beach where her is found by Loana of the fair-haired shell tribe. After the men of the tribe scare off a Archelon, a giant turtle, Tumak is taken to the village where Tumak returns the favour by saving a young girl from a rampaging Allosaurus but his brutish behaviour soon alienates the more developed shell tribe and he is again cast out, Loana leaving with him. His old tribe has been taken over by his conniving brother Sakana (Percy Herbert) and when Tumak and Loana arrive many complications ensue, including a fight between Loana and Tumak’s lover Nupondi (Martine Beswick) and Loana later being carried off by a Pteranadon and thought to be dead. But all their problems are overshadowed by a nearby volcano which suddenly erupts, leaving the tribes fighting for their very existence.
Hammer clearly threw some money at One Million Years B.C. (in his book Hammer Film Legacy, Wayne Kinsey points out at the combined budgets for the four back-to-back films shot in the summer of the previous year, Dracula Prince of Darkness, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies, came to £429,648 while the company lavished £422,816 on this one film alone) and much of the money facilitated a trip to Lanzarote and Tenerife in the Canary Islands where the wild, harsh landscapes stood in for prehistoric earth. A huge model volcano was built at further expense on the backlot at Elstree Studios and the combined expense results in a spectacular film that can still wow audiences today as much as it did in 1966.
It’s unfair to even try to judge the performances given they exclusively consist of actors having to grunt, shout nonsense syllables and react to things that aren’t there. It creates the problem, one that would hang over the two subsequent prehistoric films, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969) and Creatures the World Forgot (1971), that cavepeople grunting gibberish aren’t really all that interesting and it’s hard to care too much about them. That said, there’s more empathy here for Welch’s Loana and Richardson’s Tumak than there would be for the lookalikes in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and the entirely anonymous “creatures” of the third film.
The real stars though are Raquel Welch’s bikini (you’ll also find yourself marvelling at the hitherto undisclosed fact about prehistoric life that make-up and hair products were in much greater supply than you might have imagined) and of course Ray Harryhausen’s dinosaurs, both impressive for very different reasons. The first dinosaur we actually see is, disappointingly, the sort of optically enlarged lizard we got in the original film. A giant turtle is the first Harryhausen creation and provides the film’s first exciting set-piece, after that, it’s a riot of giant monsters, from the sudden appearance of the allosaurus to the much noisy entrance of the Pteranodon. A battle between a Ceratosaurus and a triceratops is the big effects showcase, proving once again – were proof needed – that in the mid-1960s there was simply no-one who could match the brilliance of Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects.
The opening shots, of sunrise over the prehistoric wastes, anticipates the opening shots of the ‘Dawn of Man‘ sequence in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which started filming at around the same time as Don Chaffey’s film, as indeed do scenes featuring a third tribe, the cave-dwelling Neanderthals. Wilkie Cooper’s gorgeous photography, Robert Jones art direction and the special effects supervised by George Blackwell are all first rate – the climactic volcanic eruption is particularly well done (it was recycled in Creatures the World Forgot), a few dodgy front projections aside and the strangely sepia-tinted world that the survivors emerge into to, a ravaged lunar landscape even more forbidding than what had gone before, provides a suitably memorable finale.
One Million Years B.C. may not be top flight Hammer – the lack of identifiable characters robs it of something – but it’s a technical triumph that still has enough going on to keep you hooked even when the dinosaurs are off screen. It was a box office smash for Hammer though in the States (where it played some dates with Lance Comfort’s vampire film Devils of Darkness (1965)) it suffered cuts amounting to some nine minutes – one of the biggest casualties was Martine Beswick’s wild and provocative dance routine though some of the dinosaur attacks and tribal in-fighting were also trimmed. Its success briefly prompted Hammer to consider remaking King Kong though that idea was dropped when they couldn’t get the rights and they made When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth instead. Despite its American title Prehistoric Women, the following year’s dismal Slave Girls wasn’t set in prehistory at all and is more of a lost world tale.
The EOFFTV Review 