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Tuesday, May 31, 2022

ONE MILLION B.C. (1940)

Best known for comedy shorts, Hal Roach’s feature-length Pre-Historic adventure is junk science & historical nonsense, but not the campy relic you expect.  Deservedly popular on release, it’s well-packaged entertainment with impressive special effects for the period.  Still fun, especially when seen in the fine UCLA Archive print that usually shows up.  (Give it a slight brightness bump for best results.)  Told in flashback as some lost hikers stumble upon a cave with drawings of past events, Victor Mature, in his first lead, is the beefy caveman who can’t fit in with either tribe in the valley.  Bulky enough to grab what he wants, he’s a meathead needing a woman’s touch to socialize him.  Enter Carole Landis.  Soon, he’s saving babies from magnified lizards passing as dinos, sharing root vegetables for a community stew, outrunning molten flows of lava, and merging tribes for mutual protection against savage beasts before heading off in silhouette to start a new family as the sun sets with Landis & saved child by his side.  D.W. Griffith had his last legit film job working Pre-Production on this.  Contrary to what’s been written not as director though he did find & film test Landis to play the civilizing mate.  Roach megged all the story material and Hal Roach Jr. did all the action & special effects.  Exceptional F/X for 1940, with perfectly matched film grain on the extensive process & optical camera tricks making all the difference.  Plus, clever use of simple painted backdrop cycloramas & matte work that enchant even when they don't completely convince.  Occasionally they’ll give a good shake to whatever’s at hand when an earthquake or volcanic eruption goes off.  Silly and endearing.  A famous 1966 remake, with Raquel Welch in fur and Ray Harryhaussen stop-motion dinos (not seen here) also has its champions.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Instead of the 1966 remake, here’s about half of Griffith’s MAN’S GENESIS.  (No musical accompaniment so blast out something suitably rude.)  Not only did this inspire Roach, but apparently Stanley Kubrick as well, who took the invention of the first weapon, and it’s potential as a useful tool of destruction against fellow man, straight from here.  (Note this was a very long one-reeler as cameraman Billy Bitzer cranked away at barely over 15fps to get more like 15 than 10 minutes out of a reel of finished film.  Slowest cranker in the biz.)   https://archive.org/details/silent-mans-genesis

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