The Clan of the Cave Bear also cheats: first, by subtitling the Neandertal language, and second, by offering up a narrator (Salome Jens), who interprets the whole movie for us in vaguely mystical English. The Clan of the Cave Bear, following its lead, utilises a synthetic language that is a combination of grunted vocalisations and hand gestures. Most crucially for our present purposes, that film included an invented language for its primitive characters, and not a single word of English - or French - appears anywhere in the whole thing. Insofar as the caveman genre had ever been terribly robust, Quest for Fire killed it dead after this, no movie featuring Raquel Welch or her latter-day descendants in a fur bikini could possibly be released as anything other than a parody. First, let us cast our view back just a few years, to 1981 this was the year of the Canadian film Quest for Fire ( La guerre du feu to all y'all Québécois), a very serious and extremely well-received "serious caveman movie", which sought to re-create the actual physical facts of life in three different species of the homo genus using a combination of scientific research and narrative fancy. Now, what is actually important about the film is not the setting exactly, and certainly not the story it only barely tells, but the manner in which the setting influences how the story is told. Now, nothing about that synopsis necessarily predicts that the movie will be one thing or another it could be a hoot, it could be fascinating and serious, it could be a fiasco, it could just be really not interesting at all. Waites), son of the current leader, and that is the whole of the film's conflict. Mold that into a dramatic spine and you pretty much have what passes for plot: Ayla contends throughout her life with the brutish Broud (Thomas G. That's basically the plot of the movie: Ayla, being a woman in a patriarchal clan, is not permitted to do many things, and being a foreigner in a tight-knit community, is seen as different even by those who love her she retaliates by busting all the clan's taboos and proves to be a better hunter, gatherer, doctor, scientist, leader, storyteller, and mother than all the rest put together. Also, and this part is really important, she is better than them at everything.
Many years later, Ayla (all grown up into Darryl Hannah at the very height of her popularity - a popularity that this film's monumental financial failure played a major role in ending) is the odd woman out in the Neandertal community: tall and graceful and blonde and blue-eyed, while they are all swarthy and stocky. Near to where they lived was a small Cro-Magnon community that was decimated in an earthquake, leaving only a small girl named Ayla, who was adopted into the Clan of the Cave Bear because of the kindly medicine woman of that tribe, Iza (Pamela Reed).
Now then, somewhere around the end of the last ice age, there was a tribe of Neandertal people who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear. Lucky for the novel, because the sins of the movie start early and they never really do stop. No, the cinematic Clan of the Cave Bear is even something of a disaster, losing an immense sum of money, and the author took the extreme and unusual step of suing the filmmakers for spoiling her property so badly meaning that if nothing else, we cannot use the sins of the movie to judge the novel. However, the 1986 movie based on it? Not ingenious in any way (it is a blight on the career of screenwriter John Sayles, responsible for many fine genre flicks and observational indie movies about small communities). I'll admit to never having taken the plunge into Auel's Earth's Children series, of which TCotCB is the first volume and thus I will take her fans at their word. Auel's 1980 novel The Clan of the Cave Bear will have you believe that it is an ingenious mixture of romantic fiction with impressively-researched historical fact (allowing that we know things now that we did not at the time of the book's publication, and by the cold light of 21st Century anthropology, its depiction of Neandertals is pretty far off course), and that the whole thing is as enlightening a fantasy hybridised with then-current archeological thought could ever manage to be. Let us thus pay attention to a movie that teach ADULTS a fantastically inaccurate version of what life was like 25,000 years ago.įans of Jean M. This week: Ice Age: Continental Drift is the fourth entry in the inexplicably durable franchise that teaches our children a fantastically inaccurate version of what happened in the last glacial period. Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.
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