PRODUCER "DEBUNKS" OWN PICTURE

Evening Star, Issue 23657, 17 August 1940, Page 5

PRODUCER "DEBUNKS" OWN PICTURE

It is not often that a director debunks the film he is making, yet Hal Roach did it recently. Roach, r naturally, thinks ‘ One Million b.0.,’ the spectacular pageant of prehistoric times, which he directed, is tops in entertainment. His debunking, if that is not too harsh a word, lay in cautioning the public not to accept ‘ One Million B.c.’ as a completely authentic, authoritative page of pre-history. Roach beat to the punch those inevitable members of the Aim-going public who delight in ignoring the forest to point out that the moss is growing on the wrong side of jthe trees. “ There never has been an historical motion picture that hasn’t evoked loud (bellows of rage from folks who de-

tected, or imagined they detected, inaccuracies,” Roach declared. “ We’re allowed a little more latitude when we’re dealing with. prehistoric things, since'the best scientists are divided as to what actually went on in the world before man began to record events. Anthropoligists find a fragment of jawbone and from that they reconstruct the complete skeleton of a man. A fossil hunter visualises a huge dinosaur by studying a single tooth. S 9 the public ought to allow motion picture producers some leeway, too. And we took full advantage of our dramatic licence in ‘ One Million b.c.’ ” There is a lot of fighting between cavemen and dinosaurs in the picture. That’s all wrong. The dinosaurs became extinct millions of years before the most primitive.mammals, let,alone man, existed. Tyrannosaurus, for instance, the bully of ■ all times, a giant xeptile with a month like the maw of A steam shovel, ruled the earth about 1,000,000,000 years ago. Tyrannosaurus is one of the heavies of ‘ One Million b .c. ’ Roach hopes no one, _ excepting a few purist paleontologists, will mind very much.