Martine Beswick as Queen Kari and Edina Ronay as slave girl Saria
in Prehistoric Women (dir. Michael Carreras, 1967)
I.
I like a good cavegirl flick as much as the next man, particularly when it deals with pressing social and political issues to do with class, ethnicity, and sexual relations. If the film also involves the religious worship of a giant white rhino, then that only sweetens the deal as far as I'm concened.
I couldn't, therefore, pass up the opportunity to watch Prehistoric Women when it was shown on Talking Pictures TV yesterday ...
II.
Directed by Michael Carreras, Prehistoric Women was a fantasy adventure produced by Hammer Films, that was initially released in the US in 1967. An edited version, entitled Slave Girls, was released in the UK the following year.
It starred Michael Latimer in the lead male role of David Marchant, a British explorer on safari in Africa; Jamaican-born beauty and Bond girl Martine Beswick, as Queen Kari; and the Anglo-Hungarian actress (who became a fashion designer) Edina Ronay, as the pouting blonde slave girl Saria, with whom David, all-too-predictably, falls in love.
Central to the plot is the division of an all-female tribe into a ruling class of brunettes and a subordinate class of blondes. David, having accidently found himself caught up in the middle of things, is wanted by the beautiful dark-haired queen as her mate. He, however, appalled by her cruelty towards inferiors, spurns her advances.
In fact, he has the hots for Saria and is soon encouraging her and her fair-haired comrades - as well as the men who are all kept as prisoners in a cave - to revolt against Kari, and against the Devils, a tribe of black Africans with whom she is in league (and who worship a large white rhino carved in stone).
Long story short, this slave revolt against the dark-haired matriarchal order is a success and the rhino-masked devils are driven off. What's more, Kari is impaled and killed by the horn of a charging white rhino that mysteriously appears out of the jungle in a terrible temper.
Despite proclaiming his love for her, Saria tells David that her world is not his world and insists that he return home, which, via an act of iconoclastic magic he does, thereby fulfulling the legend of the white rhino.
Once back at camp, David wonders whether it was all a mad dream - or he had really traveled back in time to reunite a lost African tribe and end a million-year-old legend ...? He begins to think it was probably the former, but then finds the white rhino brooch given to him by Saria in his pocket. So, it was true and it had happened!
The film ends on a happy romantic note: David is asked to greet some people joining the safari from London and, to his astonishment, one of the guests, called Sarah, is a reincarnation (or certainly a pretty good lookalike) of Saria.
III.
What, then, do we learn from the film?
Well, one takeaway could be that strictly enforced class divisions will invariably result in social tension and violence. That seems quite a progressive political message.
On the other hand, however, we might also note how the unconscious bias of the filmmakers results in fair-haired and light-skinned people being equated with beauty and goodness, whilst dark-haired, dark-skinned people are invariably portrayed as cruel, savage, devil-worshippers.
A movie that promotes social justice can, it seems, still perpetuate racial stereotypes - and, indeed, sexual stereotypes. Because what Prehistoric Women confirms above all else is something established in One Million Years B.C. (1966). Namely, that barefoot cavegirls wearing fur-lined animal skin bikinis will forever find a place in the (male) pornographic imagination [1].
IV.
Critically panned and commercially unsuccessful, I still rather enjoyed watching this (politically suspect) Hammer film; not least of all for the sensual (and at times sadistic) scenes involving Martine Beswick. Push comes to shove, I'm not sure I wouldn't have chosen Queen Kari over Saria had I been in David's shoes.
There's something about a domineering dark-haired woman with a whip who also knows how to handle a knife and worships a rhinoceros, that excites even more than a virtuous blonde slavegirl (even when they look like Edina Ronay).
It's arguable, in fact, that without a little coldness and cruelty a woman lacks character and I suspect that, ultimately, a great hunter like David would soon be bored by Saria/Sarah and seek out a woman more like Kari.
For as Zarathustra reminds us, the brave man desires two things above all else: danger and distraction: 'And for that reason he wants a woman who will be the most dangerous plaything of all.' [2]
Beware the lash of the savage goddess Kari - ruler of a world
where men are chained, tortured, and made slaves to desire!
Notes
[1] Evidence of this can be found on the Dangerous Minds website: click here for an excellent entry on prehistoric cheesecake and the curvaceous cavewomen of B-movie cinema.
[2] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Section XVIII of Zarathustra's discourses on 'Old and Young Women'.
Bonus: click here to watch the official trailer for Prehistoric Women (1967).
