Caveman Movies – The Men Who Say Ug!
Possibly the first film to focus on the perils of life in the “before a book was written” era was the 1912 short called The Cave Man, a single reel with Ralph Ince (who also co-directed with Charles L. Gaskill) and Edith Storey. Sadly, no copy of this film is known to exist at the time of this writing, but the fact that the character list includes names like Eric and Chloe can only leave film historians scratching their heads in puzzlement to learn. exactly what kind of cavemen are involved.
The Cave Man, which opened in April 1912, was quickly followed by Man’s Genesis, co-written and directed by none other than DW Griffith, arguably the father of cinema, in July of the same year. Subtitled ‘A Psychological Comedy Based on the Darwinian Theory of the Evolution of Man’, it’s hard to be sure if Griffith really intended this film to be taken seriously simply because it looks so comical today, despite the apparent seriousness of the cast, which includes Robert Harron and Mae Marsh. For all its shortcomings, this short was successful enough for Griffith to film a 33-minute sequel, Brute Force, in 1914. This sequel reunited Harron and Marsh as a man and fellow member of a tribe whose women are kidnapped by Bruteforce’s (Wilfred Lucas) tribe, who uses sticks and rocks as weapons in his raid. To recover, Weakhands invents the bow and arrow and successfully wins back the women from him.
In 1917 The Dinosaur and the Missing Link was released. Played strictly for laughs, the film featured animated puppets and provided an early example of Willis O’Brien’s work. The full film can be seen at America’s memory site.
Six years later, in 1923, comics genius Buster Keaton completed the transition from shorts to features with Three Ages, a film that seemingly parodies Griffith’s bigotry by telling stories from three different eras in history, one of them the prehistoric era. Concerned that moviegoers wouldn’t accept him in a feature film, Keaton stitched together three shorts so that if they didn’t work as a feature, they could be released individually. It just so happened that Keaton needn’t have worried while he was creating a comedy classic. In all three sequences, Keaton and Wallace Beery fight for the attention of Margaret Leahy, an actress of dubious talent who won the role in a competition and whose only film was this one.
Caveman films remained almost exclusively the domain of the comedy genre for the next seventeen years: one of Laurel and Hardy’s early collaborations, Flying Elephants (1928) sees Hal Roach still struggling to appreciate the strengths of cavemen. guys as a comedy duo; Willie Whopper, Ub Iwerks’ tall narrative cartoon character appeared in Cave Man (1934). Five years later, Daffy Duck found the neighborhood of Casper the Cavemen (a Jack Benny parody) and his pet dinosaur in Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (1939).
Caveman movies finally came of age in 1940 with the release of Hal Roach’s blockbuster One Million BC, the highest-grossing film of the year in the United States (excluding receipts from Gone with the Wind). took from 1939). The film originally began as a project for DW Griffith, but he clashed with Roach over a lack of character depth, so Roach and his son completed the film and Griffith’s name was dropped from the credits. The film gave 26-year-old Victor Mature his first starring role as Tumak, a member of the warlike Rock clan who woos and wins Loana (Carole Landis), the daughter of the leader of the peaceful Shell tribe. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Musical Score and Best Special Effects (which included a pig dressed as a rubber dinosaur), and its footage was reused in numerous films.
Strangely, the wave of caveman movies that might have been expected after the success of One Million BC mysteriously failed to materialize. In 1944, Bela Lugosi attempted to transplant an educated brain into the head of a prehistoric caveman he discovered on an Arctic expedition in Banner/Monogram’s ultra-cheap, shoddy programmer Return of the Ape Man. Then, six years later, Prehistoric The even cheaper Women (1950), in which the earth is ruled by women who use men simply to mate, made The Return of the Ape-Man look like award-winning material. Things didn’t improve when a fresh-faced Robert Vaughn appeared in Roger Corman’s exploitation saga Teenage Cave Man (1958), a film the future UNCLE Man described as the worst he had ever made. Then, in 1960, likable caveman Greg Martell helped a young boy battle two dinosaurs magically resurrected in the present day by a thunderstorm in the sickly sweet Dinosaurus.
In the 1960s, the caveman movie seemed to have plunged into some B-movie hell in which perfectly coiffed Neanderthals roamed wobbly sets and fought unconvincingly with rubber dinosaurs or fled from lizards with spikes attached to their legs. the back. Then, in 1966, there was a movie event that put the prehistoric movie back on the cinematic map. No, not The Man Called Flintstone, a feature-length version of the popular animated TV series, but buxom Raquel Welch’s appearance in her false eyelashes and fur bikini in One Million BC, a remake of the hit hit. Hammer’s 1940’s Hal Roach box office. study. Suddenly cavemen, or at least their women, were sexy: surely this would herald a new dawn for the caveman genre?
Sadly not. The only people inspired by the tanned girls of One Million BC were people like baddie filmmaker extraordinaire Ed Wood, who released the heinous exploitation film One Million AC/DC in 1969 with the tagline See Vala, the voluptuous cave babe! Check out Dino the plastic-eating dinosaur! The Italians briefly toyed with the genre with such unfunny comedies as Quando le donne avevano la coda (When Women Had Tails) (1970), and Quando gli uomini armarono la clava e… con le donne fecero din-don (When men wore Clubs and women played ding dong) (1971).
The emphasis returned to comedy in 1978 with the animated French adult comedy Le chanon anonymous (The Missing Link), which humorously followed the exploits of early man as he slowly learned and evolved. Three years later, in 1981, former Beatle Ringo Starr appeared in Caveman, a comedy that was arguably a little funnier than those produced by the short-lived Spaghetti Cavemen movies of the early ’70s.
Things picked up after this with a couple of movies that temporarily elevated the status of Caveman movies. Quest for Fire (1982) featured three cavemen on a quest for fire, one of whom was Ron Perlman, an actor apparently born for the caveman film genre. Then came the 1984 release of Iceman, a relatively smart exploration of the scientific consequences of the discovery of a Neanderthal caveman in the Arctic by a polar expedition. Tim Hutton, plays the anthropologist who would rather teach the thawed caveman tunes by Neil Young than conduct scientific experiments on him. The spirit of Raquel Welch returned to the genre when the blond and energetic Darryl Hannah donned (and occasionally took off) his skin for The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), set in the brief overlap between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal man. A lack of dialogue and a weak plot resulted in the film barely breaking even in the US, once again tragically missing out on a potential boom in caveman movies.
The genre limped into the ’90s with Encino Man (1992), a teen comedy in which a frozen caveman is unfrozen by a couple of high school nerds and quickly becomes the most popular guy in school. . In 1994, Universal partnered with Hanna-Barbera to produce a live-action version of The Flintstones starring John Goodman and Rick Moranis as Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. While the two leads certainly looked good, the film failed to capture the appeal of the original 1960s cartoon show. A 2000 sequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, simply confirmed the fact that its predecessor hadn’t It’s been nobody’s best time.
Another hiatus came to an end in 2002 with the release of Ice Age, a cartoon in which a sloth, saber-toothed tiger, and woolly mammoth strive to return a lost baby to its parents. The film proved to be refreshingly entertaining, becoming one of the biggest hits of the year and inevitably spawning a series of sequels.