One Million Years B.C.
Picture:
B- Sound: C+ Extras: C Film: C+
Some
films become infamous for so many reasons and are still watchable, no matter
what the problems. Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. (1966) was a
Hammer Studios production that came out two years before Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and must have had
at least a little more credibility for a very, very brief time in showing a
world of cavemen before Kubrick’s Arthur C. Clarke collaboration kicked in and
forever changed motion pictures. Sure,
it is not scientific that men existed when dinosaurs did, but how many
profitable films have been made with exactly that situation?
This film
is also infamous for how fake it looks now, and looked to a great extent then,
but audiences knew the limits of visual effects at the time. They accepted limits. The film also was ridiculed for its dumb
portrayal of cavemen, but the person who became a star and was dumped on for
decades because of it was Raquel Welch.
It made her a sex goddess, one of the last of the original Hollywood, and her presence made the film a
big hit.
Yes, she
looks great wearing next to nothing, which she did often early in her career
before so called “talents” like Britney Spears made a living at it. However, she is not the only thing that is
interesting about this very simple film.
The stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen is interesting and the film
has a consistent look and sense of silence that actually keeps you
watching. It gets thin at 100 minutes,
but is a very minor camp and genre classic that has its few moments.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image was shot by the great Wilkie Cooper,
B.S.C., a veteran of TVs The Avengers
and one of Britain’s all-time cameramen. His use of the DeLuxe color palette as it
stood then is a big plus for the film and one of the other reasons it holds up
as well as it does. This DVD benefits
from a new restoration by Fox that took the best surviving materials, and cleaned
them up for DVD. My only complaint, as
is noticed in the restoration supplement, is that detail and video colors
black, white and red looked better before
the restoration in the video realm. That
cleaning may seem to make the image look more pristine, but it really degrades
it subtly throughout. Though some of the
materials are grainer than they would have been if the original camera materials
had survived, but it took work to fix what remained. The Dolby Digital 2.0 is only listed on the
box as English Stereo and Spanish Mono, but there is also English Mono, which
(as is the case for the simple stereo remixes Fox does on their older films)
differs little from the stereo version, making the choice one of either
preference or which one comes across better on a given set-up.
The
extras offer over a dozen trailers for films within the genre, a theatrical
teaser and trailer for this film, and the restoration information and
footage. The first part shows the full
frame 1993 film master, which was dreadful with faded color, graininess beyond
belief, and major detail trouble on the left screen, and the then-impressive
1996 upgrade for the 12” LaserDisc format presented letterboxed. This version shows the 2002 film restoration
on both sides of the screen, with the additional video tweaking on the
left. In either case, they are huge
improvements over the 1990’s versions, but I like the raw 2002 images the
best. You can decide for yourself. Fox cannot do enough of these segments in
their supplements.
So there
you have it. One Million Years B.C. may not be brilliant filmmaking, but it is
much more watchable than most of the big budget garbage we get today,
especially in it genre! That is reason
enough to take a look at this new edition, sold separately and as part of a
five DVD Raquel Welch Collection set.
- Nicholas Sheffo
