FANTASY OF LIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 November 1940, Page 9

FANTASY OF LIFE

ONE MILLION YEARS AC-O.

During production, eno of the strongest, and most interesting sets in Hollywood was the setting for Hal Roach's saga of prehistoric man, “One Million 8.C.”

The most ambitious construction on the Reach lot in the twenty-five years of its history, it represented a lush primeval oasis when the world was young; it was dubbed by the cast "The Garden of Eden.'’ Its Eve was Carole Landis and its Adam Victor Mature. The snake in the spectacular fantasy was Lon Chaney Junr., who plays a strongarmed tribal leader.

But the tropical profusion of the setting almost overshadowed the actors. Since no one can say for certain what the world looked like a million years ago, the studio let its imagination run

riot. Pomegranates hung upside down and grew from moss; tree ferns’, ten feet high, imported from Australia, bent grotesquely against gnarled trees with roots halfway up their trunks; dates grew upwards on transformed sycamore trees, and huge Abyssinian banana trees, giant South American staghorn ferns and exotic fruits from Africa grew in wild abandon, with little regard for accepted zoology. It was all quite fantastic, but not illogical, for in the evolution of plant life anything was possible.