What makes it different from others?

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

. . . the Adam & Eve Era, according to the best estimate of the Roman Authorities on such things. ONE MILLION B.C. is shot when Earth's human population was still all-White, made up of the blonde Shell People and the less advanced brunette Rock Folks. Blonde princess Loana introduces the Rockers to agriculture, jewelry, stone tools, table manners, and a brassiere technology that puts even the most modern lingerie of the 1930s to shame. Then the earthquakes that killed off the dinosaurs (all but one got sucked down cracks into the Abyss due to the Law of Gravity acting upon their excessive body mass) destroys the Rockers' home cave. Unfortunately, the only surviving dinosaur has the Shell Sect pinned inside THEIR own grotto, with no access to the bounty of their fields and orchards. Fortuitously, the Endangered Species Act hasn't been passed yet, so the domesticated Rockers bury this Last Dino Standing under a rock slide, and everyone lives as happily afterwards as can be expected for a gang of citizens at least 49,700 generations away from being able to exercise their Second Amendment Rights when Danger looms.

One Million B.C. was Victor Mature's (Louisville, Kentucky's second "Greatest") second film, and consequently launched a very successful career that encompassed the realm of "film noir" to "sand and sandal epics". His first film was a small part in "The Housekeeper's Daughter". One Million B.C. begins with a group of young people going into a cave to escape a snow storm and an Archaeologist interpreting various cave drawings that tell the story of the people that once lived there. What follows is a saga of two groups of cave people with two totally different cultures that wind up fighting one another. Eventually the two groups have to join forces to fight off several threatening dinosaurs. The special effects are a bit dated as well as disappointing. The viewer gets to watch an alligator with make-up type of fins fight a monitor lizard in one of the key scenes. One can only wonder what would have happened if the S.P.C.A. had been around at that time. Considering the fact that this film was released in 1940 and King Kong was released in 1933 the film makers would have been better served to use a Willis O'Brien type of stop action motion technique. The cave people actors in this film communicate with indistinguishably utterances and a lot of pointing with hand gestures. Lon Chaney Jr. and Victor Mature become engaged in an exciting alpha male battle that conveys the struggle of an evolving culture. The film is very entertaining even if the viewer has to remind himself from time to time that "humans were not living when the dinosaurs existed. Having said that, the film is well worth watching.

ONE MILLION B.C. is a laughably ridiculous caveman movie. Maybe it was neat in 1940, but it has not aged well. Modern animals are dressed up as woolly mammoths and dinosaurs, which I can handle. The performances are silly, though.The film tells the story of two different tribes of cave people. The "rock people" fight over their food, while the "shell people" share it amongst themselves. When Tumak is cast out of his hunting tribe (the "rock people") he learns the ways of the peaceful "shell people". As one might guess, he falls in love with a girl from the other tribe.There is very little dialogue, except for caveman gibberish. The cave people communicate using simple physical gestures. This all helps to capture a sense of "realism", I'm sure. The prehistoric monsters and special effects will seem primitive to modern audiences, but they get the job done using the methods available at the time. I thought they were kind of cool, in a way.This movie seems to want to be a prehistoric epic, but I don't know how anyone could have taken it seriously, even back in 1940.

Although I am not that much of a fan of the 1966 Hammer color remake to begin with – or caveman epics in general – I had always been intrigued by the original 1940 black-and-white version which, apart from being arguably Hal Roach's most ambitious undertaking, was (ostensibly) a pioneering work in special effects and, furthermore, served to give Victor Mature his first starring role. Although a friend of mine (who is the No. 1 fan of the latter that I know of) does have a 16mm print of this under its British title MAN AND HIS MATE, I eventually managed to track it down via a TCM USA screening. Having now watched it for myself, I cannot say that it has served to endear the genre in my eyes or make the thin plot any more compelling than in the Hammer version. Firstly, the special effects may have been nominated for an Oscar, have a primitive {sic} charm about them and been re-utilized in many another cheap production thereafter (notably the abysmal ROBOT MONSTER [1953]) but the various anachronistic dinosaurs look far too much like magnified-lizards-shot-on-miniature-sets to be believably dangerous; a long-drawn out battle between two such 'monsters' is a particular liability! Besides, the grunt-laden 'dialogue' grows alternately silly and tiresome as the film progresses; at least, the film-makers have provided a prologue in which modern day travelers take shelter from the rain in a cave and a residing(?) anthropologist entertains them by interpreting the age-old illustrations on the walls as re-enacted by themselves. At the age of just 33, Lon Chaney Jr. is made up to look much older and play Mature's dad while the latter – sporting a full head of hair a decade before SAMSON AND DELILAH (1949) – appears decidedly schoolboyish; still, what is even harder to accept is how blonde Carole Landis blossomed amidst these surroundings! This is not to say that the film is unentertaining or badly made because it really is not; in fact, the climactic volcano eruption is very well staged and the film's undeniable highlight, the set decoration appropriately atmospheric and Werner R. Heymann's rousing score was deservedly singled out by the Academy for Oscar consideration. Incidentally, for years it was believed that forgotten cinema pioneer D. W. Griffith – whose famous two-reeler MAN'S GENESIS (1912) may well have inspired the film to begin with – had been actively involved in the production before getting the sack from Roach, but his contribution has since been disputed as having been all too minimal (unless our resident Griffith expert wants to give his informed account of the matter).