Clan of the Cave Bear (1986)

Clan of the Cave Bear is a parable of prehistoric man that might sit well with Betty Friedan.  Amid the problems facing early man, being survival from the elements, wildlife, starvation and the budding reality that killing each other is always an option, this movie questions how and if one stacked blond could make a difference.  Why do the men get to make the decisions, she wonders, but we sit there wondering if feminism was really in the cards at this point in our early history.

This wouldn’t bother me so much if I actually believed that I was looking at the story of early man.  Clan of the Cave Bear makes a noble effort to display early mankind from the woman’s point of view, but since neither Daryll Hannah, or anyone else in the film, looks like they’ve just stepped out of hair and make-up, it’s hard to tie them to a period.

The movie takes place at a moment when prehistoric man was on his way out and the Cro-Magnon man was about to replace him.  We center on Ayla, played by Hannah, a cavewoman who was separated from her people as a child due to a devastating earthquake.  Left alone to fend for herself, she suffers the kinds of unimaginable Hell that is only possible if you’re a lot and wandering person in a movie production.  In reality, she’d be dead in a week.  But since this is a movie, this Cro-Magnon is adopted into a neanderthal family who, of course, look cock-eyed at her and don’t think she’s worthy to be in their numbers.  That means that she has to outdo and outrun and outfight the men-folk in order to prove herself.

None of this has any basis in reality.  At all times, the production looks so phony that I felt like I was looking at reenactments made up for National Geographic with so many gobs of nudity and sexual experimentation that it could have run on the Playboy Channel (and probably will).

Quite obviously, the movie rests its unease between two far superior films.  The first is the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the other is Quest for Fire.  Those films leaned toward a measure of reality, the grim reality that early man had to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  This film, noble in its intentions, never evolves beyond just being a movie.