Cinema: The New Picture: May 13, 1940

One Million B. C. (United Artists), Hollywood’s most important contribution to paleontology since The Lost World, spectacularly illustrates the Hal Roach theory of evolution—when Cave Boy meets Cave Girl there is a big improvement in mankind’s table manners. Early in 1,000,000 B. C. Cave Boy is still tearing off hunks of roast triceratops, scrambling up a high rock to squat and gnaw. By 999,999 B. C. Cave Girl has him eating out of a clam shell. She is less successful with the shoals of hungry reptiles which swarm into the picture from practically every geologic epoch, all of whom share a taste for cave folk.

In making One Million B. C. Directors Hal Roach & Hal Roach Jr. have thrown science to the winds that howl through arid Fire Valley, Nev. where most of the thriller was filmed. They rely for red-blooded entertainment on such spectacles as a giant lizard devouring a man, a tapir-like monster ingesting a python, a battle royal between two dinosaurs.

The grisly Rock People are scarcely less gluttonous. In one spirited set-to over supper, Tumak, the picture’s Tarzan-like hero (Victor Mature), is heaved off a cliff by Angry Volcano, his father (Lon Chancy Jr.). Five minutes later he is heaved off another cliff by a mammoth. Amid assorted saurians Tumak floats safely down to the country of the Shell People, who are soft-living sybarites about 1,001,940 years ahead of their time. Even a cave man can see that Shining Star, their blonde leading lady (Carole Landis), is a Hollywood babe in a deerskin playsuit.

Modern audiences should not be surprised when Tumak carries off Cinemactress Landis to civilize his own family. She is making fair headway when an erupting volcano, a river of molten lava, an earthquake and a siege by the biggest lizard of all unexpectedly further Progress by merging the Shell and Rock tribes.

The ingenious Roaches put fur coats on a pair of old Los Angeles elephants, Queenie and Sally, to simulate mammoths. A cow was similarly bewigged to make an aurochs. Dinosaurs used in the picture are four-foot-long South American tejus blown up by trick camera work to Mesozoic dimensions. Victor in the dinosaur battle is a baby alligator with a fin dubbed in his back.

As it turned out, chief casualty of gory One Million B. C. was David Wark Griffith, big-shot director of Hollywood’s own prehistory. Called in by the Roaches to produce his first picture since he remade Broken Blossoms in England in 1936, Griffith declined to take any credit for One Million B. C. Said he: “My name would do the film little good, and I am sure that the picture would do me little good.”