PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, sociological*

From a marketing standpoint, PREHISTORIC WOMEN probably came about due to the success of Hammer's co-production (with Seven Arts) of 1966's ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. Indeed, WOMEN used some of the costumes from YEARS, as well as taking actress Martine Beswicke and giving her the lead in WOMEN. It's even arguable that the basic idea of the YEARS screenplay-- reputedly authored by the film's producer Michael Carreras, though other scripters provided the finished product-- recycles one of YEARS' basic ideas, a conflict between primitive tribes.

Yet WOMEN takes such a peculiar tack with its "babes-in-fur-bikinis" motif that I'm tempted to wonder if the real force behind the film's genesis might have been a ten-year-old Carreras reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, which his adult self later tried to translate into bankable cinema.

One of the most famous tropes in Burroughs' TARZAN books is his repetition of an idea more or less swiped from Rider Haggard (whose novel SHE Carreras adapted in 1965): the idea that the "dark continent" of Africa harbored countless sub-civilizations of white tribes descended from emigrants from Europe or the Middle East. In the late 1960s this was a difficult trope to make credible any more, and for that reason WOMEN's main character-- white hunter David Marchent (Michael Latimer)-- has to pass through what seems like a dimensional gate to encounter a white tribe living in Africa.

Carreras's backstory for this tribe is incredibly labored and confusing to anyone who tries to sort it out. Carreras did not write Hammer screenplays nearly as often as his colleague Anthony Hinds-- WOMEN is just his fifth script out of eight credited on IMDB-- but it seems odd that he even attempted to design anything more involved than the aforementioned YEARS. Yet the man told a reasonably coherent story for his 1964 CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, which required a complicated backstory for the titular mummy. In that film, Carreras provided a flashback that clarified the situation. But in WOMEN, Carreras relies on three different interlocutors to provide exposition, when what he really needs is another flashback to dramatize the origins of the peculiar tribe.

Marchent, after getting a partial lowdown from some Black Africans reciting the history of the curse of the White Rhinoceros, passes through the dimension door and finds himself in another jungle. A blonde woman, fleeing pursuit, attacks him-- an attack never explained, given that he looks nothing like her enemies-- and then both of them are captured by a group of unspeaking brunette women. Marchent is hauled before the queen of the unnamed tribe, Kari (Martine Beswicke). She provides some more exposition, clarifying that in this world, the brunette white women enslave all the blonde white women-- though Kari's the only brunette who speaks or takes any decisive actions. One line calls some of the brunettes "Tongueless Ones," and all of them might as well be tongueless since they have no lines.

In contrast, the blondes get a fair number of lines in which they express their wretched enslavement, particularly the blonde Marchent first met, one Saria (Edina Ronay). Despite having tried to either stab or brain him with a rock earlier, Saria and Marchent become interested in each other, while evil queen Kari lusts after Marchent. He refuses her attentions because he doesn't believe that either of the sexes should dominate the other, or something like that. The angry Amazon-- and she does seem to be the only tribeswoman who can fight, by the way she takes down a disrespectful slave-- consigns Marchent to an underground prison, where it seems that all of the tribe's men are kept, regardless of their hair-color.

Other details about the tribe's history come out as Marchent chats with an old man who knows a lot of stuff. He claims that the whole tribe emigrated from another land, but he loosely implies that the "dark ones" in that tribe were somehow in thrall to the "fair ones." However, the fair ones overhunted the rhinoceri in the area, potentially enraging the neighboring black natives, for whom the white rhino was a particular object of veneration. Once all the rhinos were gone, the fair ones tried to run a hoax on the natives-- a barbaric people called "the devils"-- by erecting an idol of a white rhino. Somehow this placated the devils-- until a rebellious brunette slave, Kari herself, exposed the hoax to the natives. There's also something about the vengeance of "the gods," who may be responsible for moving the whole kit-and-kaboodle into a dimension removed from reality. But the upshot is that Kari and her fellow brunette Amazons gain control over everyone else in the tribe, keeping all the men in the underground caves and paying tribute to the devils by periodically giving up one of the blondes to the savages. (Whether the victims get married or eaten, the pattern seems like a clear callback to the 1933 KING KONG.) In addition, when the blondes aren't being sacrificed, they have to dance for Kari's amusement.

There are, by the bye, far more musical interludes than one would expect to find in a jungle-babe flick, and I suspect that these various interludes, like the costuming, may have stemmed from some production exigency. (A couple of scenes even focus on male Black Africans, so it's not just about putting the shapely lasses on display.) Maybe the musical segments also make up for a low level of action. Marchent is made something of a pawn between Kari and Saria, for she encourages him to play up to the queen in order to foment a rebellion. Then the wishy-washy blonde changes her mind out of jealousy and fouls up the whole plan, potentially putting Marchent in a position to get killed. Fortunately for the good guys, Kari simply sends Marchent back to the caves, which in a roundabout way helps him free the males and lead an attack to overthrow the reign of Kari and her devils. To be sure, Kari is defeated not by Marchent but by the spectre of a white rhino, though it's not at all clear why the rhinoceros-god would have any animus toward Kari.

WOMEN is a strange concoction of barely acknowledged racial elements and overdone sexual elements, even though it's ambivalent as to whether Kari ever beds Marchent. Kari, indubitably the central character since her traitorous act brings about the tribal curse, is nevertheless a hollow and fairly absurd character, and actress Beswicke played to that absurdity by making her something of a shrieking fishwife. Maybe Carreras didn't expect anyone in the audience to care whether or not the backstory made any sense; maybe he thought they'd only be ogling the ladies the whole time. Yet he could have scripted something much simpler if all he'd wanted was a sex-show-- and the very incoherence of the script suggests that he may have wanted to express his own liking for Burroughsian entertainments.