ONE MILLION B.C.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 162, 31 July 1942, Page 16

ONE MILLION B.C.

(Roach-United Artists)

HE Roaches, senior and junior, have built up a reputation for slapstick comedy, and One Million B.C. is not

such a fradcicai ceparture from type as it may seem or as they probably like to think it is. Their contribution to scientific knowledge and the gaiety of cinema audiences is achieved mainly with the aid of a couple of elephants dressed in fur coats to look like mammoths, a collection of South American lizards enormously enlarged to look like dinosaurs. a baby alligator with a fin stuck on its back and enlarged to.similar. primordial proportions, the film actor Victor Mature with his hair ruffled and his torso bared to look like a Cave Boy, the film actress Carole Landis somewhat similarly treated to look like a Hollywood Cave Girl, and a bunch of Hollywood’s ugliest extras dressed in skin shirts to represent our neolithic ancestors. With the further assistance of some trick cameramen and an erupting volcano, a pretty good time is had by all except

one of the lizards, which is bitten to death by the baby alligator, and some of the ugly extras who get into an argument with the saurians and the elephants in fur coats, and look even uglier after it is over. But amid these grisly and spectacular reminders that the world one million nineteen hundred. and forty-two years ago was not a much more pleasant place to live in than it is to-day, Romance blossoms. So does Evolution. In fact, it runs amuck. When the Cave Boy. (who, belongs to the Rock People), is tossed off a cliff into a river by a mammoth, he floats backward into time from one geologic epoch to an even earlier one, but in compensation for the uncomfortable presence of huge reptiles which this entails, he meets the Cave Girl and her comparatively cultured folk (the Shell People), who teach him not only better table manners but also the rudiments of community living, crooning, cooking with gas, and modern warfare. Time marches on a few more aeons when, as the result of a volcanic eruption and the onslaught of a saurian panzer division, the Rock People and ‘the Shell People join forces in a prehistoric system of Collective Security. The picture, I may add, is two years old-but what’s two years in one million nineteen hundred and fortv-two?