Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

One Million B.C. Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 21, 2017

The University of Utah, my fair (?) alma mater, has had a somewhat spotty relationship with science. On the plus side, the first successful transplant of a Jarvik artificial heart took place at the University of Utah Medical Center in 1982, and while patient Barney Clark didn’t last that long with the device, it marked an important advance in artificial organ technology (some trivia fans may know that none other than ventriloquist Paul Winchell had donated his patent for his design of an artificial heart to the University of Utah, which some claim Jarvik utilized in his design). On the minus side, proponents of abundant (as in infinite) clean energy may remember the so-called “cold fusion” scandal that erupted a few years after the artificial heart implantation when two scientists named Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons insisted they had solved one of the enduring problems of nuclear physics (in fairness it should be noted that only Pons was associated with the University of Utah). With those rather markedly different scientific escapades in mind, it’s with some trepidation that I quote a Scientific American podcast which in turn cited research done by the University of Utah which suggests that only 20,000 or so “humans” (or what passed for them, anyway) were tooling around in 1,000,000 B.C., a datapoint they arrived at by reading genomes in modern humans and tracing various commonalities backward through time. The actual number the Utah scientists came up with was more like 18,500, but no matter how few (or in fact many) “cavemen” or "cavewomen" there may have been back in the day, chances are very few if any of them looked anything like Victor Mature, Carole Landis or Lon Chaney, Jr., the stars of the unabashedly silly One Million B.C..

There’s a kind of sweet naivete that runs through One Million B.C. that makes it clear why films like Caveman could so easily skewer some of its presentational aspects. The film has a framing device of sorts where a “modern day” anthropologist (Conrad Nagel, who also narrates) relays a story culled from some cave paintings to a coterie of stranded hikers who have stumbled upon him and his work. Among the hikers are Victor Mature and Carole Landis, who soon “become” the prehistoric characters the anthropologist is talking about.

Once the film ventures back into the dawn of time, we meet Tumak (Victor Mature), who, along with his father Akhoba (Lon Chaney, Jr.) are part of a tribe that hunts and forages and has a clear pecking order that is obviously geared toward the fittest (in the Darwinian sense). That pecking order is threatened when Tumak and Akhoba get into it over some food, with the result being that Tumak is banished and after a couple of calamities involving falls and interactions with some kind of silly looking beasts, he ends up floating down a river kind of like an adult version of baby Moses. He’s discovered by Loana (Carole Landis), who belongs to a tribe that is at least somewhat more “evolved” than Tumak’s group.

The bulk of the rest of the story is not exactly a paradigm of narrative ingenuity, and involves Tumak repeatedly learning “nicer” ways to do things from Loana and her tribesmen and women, while any number of cavefolks also repeatedly get chased into trees by a variety of frankly not very threatening looking creatures. There are a number of fun if kitschy looking special effects sequences in the film, including a bunch of rear projection shots that supposedly put Tumak and Loana in the path of danger from two marauding giant lizards. The climax of the film is the eruption of a nearby volcano (of course), and while some of the effects work is almost laughable (cameras shaking back and forth to approximate an “earthquake”), there are some actually quite impressive effects featuring lava, including a surprisingly frank depiction of one character getting buried by the flow.

One Million B.C. may provoke unintended laughter from younger viewers especially, with the film’s supposed caveman “language” one of the more comical elements. Other passing attributes which may occasion a giggle or two are the almost fetishistic uses of spears (something else that causes a bit of tension for the badly behaved Tumak) and at least one brief sighting of what is obviously a man wearing a rubber dinosaur costume. This was a film that probably appealed to the kiddos more than the adults even back in 1940 when it was originally released, and my hunch is it will continue to do the same in the 21st century.

One Million B.C. Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

One Million B.C. is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of VCI and MVD Visual with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.38:1. VCI has had a somewhat troubled history with their Blu-ray releases, including their first "at bat" with this particular title, one which had even worse "vertical banding" anomalies than what I described in the Ruby Blu-ray review. In fact, you can see this issue in the Main Menu of this rejiggered release, since it apparently still includes scenes from the first, problematic, encode (look at screenshot 20 and you'll get at least some idea of what was wrong with the first version). The good news is the vertical issues are absent from this newer version, and in fact just going by VCI's somewhat spotty track record, this looks pretty spectacular. While some restoration has obviously been done, there are still a few issues, including some wobble (quite noticeable during the UCLA Film Archives title card), and, later, recurrent damage on the right side of the frame (pay attention especially during the volcano eruption sequences). That said, any really horrible scratches and blemishes have evidently been removed, and while I personally found the transfer a bit on the dark side, contrast looks solid. While there is grain in this transfer, my hunch is some kind of high frequency filtering was done, since there really isn't any appreciable uptick in grain during things like optical dissolves or even some of the rear proejection work. For that reason, those who prefer a heavier looking grain field may well want to downgrade the score I gave this presentation.

One Million B.C. Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

One Million B.C.'s LPCM 2.0 mono track can't quite overcome some source limitations, but aside from an overall boxy sound, things come across at least relatively full bodied. The film doesn't really have traditional "dialogue", but it's almost through scored, and the music sounds decent if occasionally a little brittle in the upper registers. There are no major issues with age related wear and tear beyond the obviously dated sound of the track.

One Million B.C. Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary by Film Historian Toby Roan


• Photo Gallery (1080p; 10:08) features a lot of key art.

One Million B.C. Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

One Million B.C. is just good, goofy fun most of the time, and those with a certain skewed, jaded sense of humor may find the film appealing in ways that its makers never intended. This is hardly "history" by any stretch of the imagination, but it has some hokily amusing special effects. VCI has eliminated the weird vertical line issue that hobbled their first try with this title, but videophiles are still encouraged to carefully parse the screenshots accompanying this review to see how they feel about this presentation. With caveats duly noted, One Million B.C. comes Recommended.