Dis­cov­er the pri­mal thrills of this pre­his­toric B‑movie

“This is a sto­ry of long, long ago, when the world was just begin­ning,” states a voiceover at the start of One Mil­lion Years BC. The ini­tial dark­ness of the screen is invad­ed by a series of psy­che­del­ic images (colour-lit vapour and clouds, rapid­ly mov­ing stars) sug­gest­ing the begin­ning not just of the world, but of the cos­mos. ​“A world ear­ly in the morn­ing of time – a hard unfriend­ly world,” con­tin­ues the voiceover, ​“Crea­tures who sit and wait, crea­tures who must kill to live – and man, supe­ri­or to the crea­tures only in his cunning…”

Don Chaffey’s film may be back­ward look­ing, both in its pre­his­toric set­ting and in its sta­tus as a remake of Hal Roach’s One Mil­lion BC from 1940, but it also antic­i­pates the ​‘Dawn of Man’ sequence in Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (released two years lat­er in 1968) and even the open­ing scroll of George Lucas’ Star Wars. Indeed, although One Mil­lion Years BC is osten­si­bly con­cerned with the atavis­tic anthro­pol­o­gy that has allowed us to evolve (or not) into who we are today, it is clos­er to sci­ence fic­tion – or to the fan­ta­sy world of Skull Island in King Kong – than to any kind of his­tor­i­cal recon­struc­tion. Dinosaurs became extinct 66 mil­lion years BCE, which was a good 65-and-half mil­lion years before Homo sapi­ens first appeared – and yet here we see them exist­ing and fight­ing togeth­er, along­side gigan­tic spi­ders straight from Jack Arnold’s Taran­tu­la or The Incred­i­ble Shrink­ing Man rather than from any geo­log­i­cal record.

Chaffey’s film is a saga of fra­ter­nal strife, in which we fol­low Tumak (John Richard­son) – broth­er of the jeal­ous­ly ambi­tious (and rape-hap­py) Sakana (Per­cy Her­bert) and son of the rugged Rock people’s bru­tal chief­tain Akho­ba (Robert Brown) – as he finds him­self exiled and forced to expand his own nar­row bound­aries. Tumak stum­bles upon the Shell tribe – more advanced, fair­er-haired folk who have devel­oped sewing and weapon-mak­ing skills, and adopt­ed com­mu­nal val­ues of coop­er­a­tion, com­pas­sion and clemency.

Despite hav­ing the brunette admir­er Nupon­di (Mar­tine Beswick) back home in the rocks, Tumak is quick to realise that gentle(cave)men pre­fer blondes – and beach babe Loana (Raquel Welch) is like­wise drawn to Tumak’s har­di­ness and indi­vid­ual brav­ery. If Welch’s first line in the film, ​“Ooh da la”, sounds a bit like ​“Ooh là là”, that is because her fur-biki­ni-clad body, promi­nent on pub­lic­i­ty posters (and sub­se­quent­ly a best-sell­ing pin-up), was the film’s unique sell­ing point. Dinosaurs are well and good – espe­cial­ly when they are ani­mat­ed with the con­sum­mate art of Ray Har­ry­hausen – but Ham­mer had long under­stood that it is sex that real­ly sells. Film audi­ences, after all, still share the baser instincts of the prim­i­tives on screen.

If One Mil­lion Years BC is a tale of two tribes and their even­tu­al mis­ce­gena­tion (fig­ured – ooh da la – as a cli­mac­ti­cal­ly erupt­ing vol­cano), it is also a reminder of the pri­mal dri­ves – sex, vio­lence – from which we nev­er ful­ly progress. There is in fact a third tribe here – a group of ape­like sav­ages liv­ing in a hid­den cave locat­ed between the ter­ri­to­ries of the Rock and Shell peo­ples. These entire­ly bes­tial, bare­ly char­ac­terised fig­ures (not unlike the ​‘crawlers’ from Neil Marshall’s The Descent) are pre­sent­ed as swarthy avatars of ter­ror, in an uncom­fort­able reflec­tion of more con­tem­po­rary racial/​colonial ideologies.

Make no mis­take: One Mil­lion Years BC def­i­nite­ly priv­i­leges pale-skinned blondes as the torch­bear­ers for civil­i­sa­tion. Per­haps more sub­ver­sive­ly, how­ev­er, the sim­i­lar­i­ties between these tribes – all troglodyt­ic, all seen fight­ing in their sep­a­rate caves for dom­i­nance over tro­phy pos­ses­sions – are more strik­ing than the dif­fer­ences, and we can see aspects of our­selves in all three groups. We may feel supe­ri­or to the ante­dilu­vian crea­tures on the screen, we may imag­ine we live in a world of post-racial enlight­en­ment – but then this is also the age of Trump, of Brex­it, and of internecine strife lit­tle dif­fer­ent from that por­trayed in the film.

While the set-piece bat­tles – whether beast-on-beast, beast-on-human or human-on-human – come with for­mu­la­ic reg­u­lar­i­ty, punc­tu­at­ing a flim­sy, often cheesy plot with crowd-pleas­ing action and spec­ta­cle, these scenes also serve to under­score a world gov­erned by end­less cru­el­ty and con­flict, where every­one occu­pies their pre­car­i­ous place on the same food chain. One Mil­lion Years BC would make an inter­est­ing dou­ble-fea­ture with Steve Oram’s neo-nean­derthal satire Aaaaaaaah!, set not so very long, long ago, but cov­er­ing sim­i­lar primeval behaviours.

One Mil­lion Years BC is released via Stu­dio Canal in a Lim­it­ed Edi­tion Steel­book Blu-ray on 19 Decem­ber. The 50^th anniver­sary restora­tion is also out now on Doubleplay.