When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970): Part One.

We open a long, long, loooooooooong time ago, before the moon was even a thing, at dawn on a cliff overlooking the sea, where a tribe of primitive cave-dwellers have gathered to complete a ritual to the returning sun.

And as said sun begins to rise and clear the horizon, this ceremony reaches a fever pitch. Here, one should note this ingrained ritual of thanks also involves human sacrifices; in this instance, a trio of blonde women.

Now, seems that being born with the wrong pigment carries an ostracizing and deadly stigma in this society, which will get you segregated from the rest of the tribe until your number comes up and you get picked -- wait, sorry. Make that, You have the honor of being an important cog and catalyst for the continuation of the solar cycle.

Only something goes slightly awry with this particular sunrise, as the giant glowing orb in the sky belches out a huge discharge of … plasma or something, which wreaks havoc on their surroundings, kicking up some strong winds and violent waves.

Freaked out over this, the ceremony kinda falls apart from there as one of those blondes, who wasn’t too keen on getting her skull cracked-open with a rock before her body is pushed off the cliff into the waiting surf below, makes a break for it.

But as several guards move to stop her, during the resulting confusion, another intended victim, Sanna, makes a slightly more effective escape by going over the side of the cliff. And I say ‘more effective’ because the girl safely splashes down somewhere below and is swept out to sea, where she is subsequently picked up and rescued by another tribe passing by on a fishing raft.

Taken back to their camp several miles up the beach, Sanna (Vetri) is soon smitten with one of those prehistoric fishermen. Turns out these feelings are mutual as Tara (Hawdon) is equally infatuated with this new girl; much to the consternation of his old girlfriend (--old lady? wife?), Ayak (Hassall), who soon pits the other cavewomen against this fair-haired interloper after a rousing cat-fight.

But for right now the men of the tribe have no time for this drama. You see, a giant Plesiosaurus these fishermen apparently netted wasn’t quite as secured as they thought, breaks free, and starts razing their ramshackle village. 

And the damage would’ve been much worse if not for the fast thinking of Tara and several others, using the flammable oils extracted from the last aquatic dinosaur they caught as some ersatz napalm and flash-fry the animal, turning the incident from a tragedy into an impromptu barbecue, bringing this fairly righteous kaiju-fight to a tasty end.

Meanwhile, Kingsor (Allen), leader of the Rock Tribe from which Sanna had escaped, has concluded from the weird celestial goings on in the sky (-- there are now two glowing orbs up there instead of one --) that despite his efforts of doubling-down on the usual sacrifice, the Sun-God is still angry with them over the one that got away. Thus and so, he leads an expedition in force to comb the area in an effort to find the girl, finish the ritual, appease their god, and return things to normal.

This search eventually leads them to the Beach People’s camp (-- they appear to have had dealings before, hence the lack of a massacre), where he quickly shouts down their tribal leader and soon has the whole encampment in a lathered Chicken Little tizzy over what’s going on in the sky.

And while Tara denies the girl he is looking for is here, the spiteful Ayak is more than willing to give her up. But! Sanna saw Kingsor and his goons coming, managed to sneak away, and headed further inland, where things even more dangerous than native superstitions are waiting...

Despite Ursula Andress turning down the lead role over a salary dispute after appearing in She (1965) for them, Hammer Films still scored a huge hit with One Million Years B.C. (1966), a loose remake of Hal Roach’s anachronistic cavemen vs. dinosaurs epic One Million B.C. (1940). This was thanks in equal parts to the FX wizardry of Ray Harryhausen and Andress’ capable replacement, Raquel Welch, her best assets, and her leather bikini.

The film was shot for around $560,000 and would bring in over $8 million worldwide. So it should come as a surprise to no one that James Carreras, co-founder and head of Hammer Studios, wanted an immediate follow-up to cash-in.

But 20th Century Fox, Hammer’s current partner in a long line of rotating American distributors, wasn’t interested in the film, citing the poor box-office returns of Hammer’s other Fox productions, The Viking Queen (1967) and Five Million Years to Earth (alias Quatermass and the Pit, 1967). And after The Lost Continent (1968) landed with a thud, Fox let their current deal expire. And so, Carreras would once again have to seek out a new production partner.

Firstly, he commissioned a poster for that proposed sequel, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), and then used that to help negotiate a new deal with his old friend Eliot Hyman, the current chairman of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.

Eliot Hyman.

Hyman was one of the first to hit it big in TV-syndication, acquiring films, cartoons and short subjects and packaging them off for broadcast through his Associated Artists Productions. He then leveraged that into financing new films, working with John Huston on Moulin Rouge (1953) and Moby Dick (1956), and was instrumental in co-financing Hammer’s first big breakout hit, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

In 1960, after selling off A.A.P., Hyman formed Seven Arts Productions, which continued to syndicate films for television but also backed Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) and Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). Then, in late 1966, Seven Arts would merge with a cash-strapped Warner Bros. in a not-quite hostile takeover.

Hyman, meanwhile, seeing how much money Fox had made distributing One Million Years B.C., immediately signed on to distribute and co-finance that follow-up along with its proposed double-bill partner, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), giving the usually cash-strapped Hammer a little more breathing room. Turns out they’d need every penny.

As the production solidified, Michael Carreras promoted Aida Young, one of his associate producers on both One Million Years B.C. and She, to run the production of both proposed sequels: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and The Vengeance of She (1968).

 (L-R) Olinka Berova, Aida Young, Cliff Owen (Vengeance of She, 1968).

The son of James Carreras, Michael had worked for his father’s studio on a ton of films that helped put Hammer on the map in the late 1950s and saw them surge into the ‘60s, writing, producing or directing films ranging from Gothic horrors -- The Curse of Frankenstein, to psychological thrillers -- Maniac (1963), to thrilling adventure yarns set around the globe -- The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), to science-fiction -- X…the Unknown (1956), and fantasy, including both One Million Years B.C. and She.

Young started in the editing room of a documentary outfit and then moved to television, where she became a production manager or showrunner on series like The Invisible Man (1958-1959) and Danger Man (1960-1966). She had worked for Hammer before as an assistant or 2nd unit director on films like Man in Hiding (1953), Bad Blonde (1953), with doomed American ex-pat Barbara Payton, and their inaugural sci-fi efforts Four-Sided Triangle (1953) and The Creeping Unknown (alias The Quatermass XPeriment, 1955).

Michael Carreras.

Then, in 1963, Michael Carreras struck out on his own with his Capricorn Productions to produce, write and direct the musical showcase What a Crazy World (1963), featuring acts like Freddie and the Dreamers and The Happy Wanderers, for Associated British Picture Corp. Here, Carreras first hired Young as an associate producer, who then brought her back to Hammer with him to work as an AP on his next three pictures; the two already mentioned plus Prehistoric Women (alias Slave Girls, 1966).

“As an associate producer I mainly stood in for Michael, who sometimes wasn’t there. I was a liaison between the director and him and made sure everything ran smoothly.,” said Young in Wayne Kinsey’s exhaustive and invaluable Hammer Films: The Elstree Studios Years (2007). “Michael and I used to get on very well together. He was highly amused at me, having a woman there, but we got along terribly well. So I learnt a lot from him but he really didn’t want to be a producer; he really only wanted to be a director and write. He hated being a producer so he left a lot to me.”

As for her modus operandi: “I tried to stop things from happening before they happened. In a way it’s a [glorified] production manager but you had more responsibility; you had the responsibility of the cast and you were at the script meetings and so on. And with Michael it was wonderful because he left a lot to me.”

And when it came time for a promotion on The Vengeance of She, “Michael didn’t want to [produce the picture],” said Young (ibid). “I had been his associate producer on a couple of films [and] I think I argued, could I produce it? And they gave it to me.” But as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. “I considered I could be a producer quite easily until I was a producer, and then I realized the responsibilities that a producer has -- the buck stops with you!” Why, yes, Fellow Programs, we will qualify that as ominous foreshadowing.

Young would also take over the production of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, yet another sequel, when Anthony Keyes was in an accident and proved unavailable. Keyes had been another lynch-pin in Hammer’s success, serving as a producer on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and The Brides of Dracula (1960). “He went to play golf in Spain and I think he broke his leg or his arm or something and couldn’t get back,” Young recalled in an interview for The British Entertainment History Project (September, 1995).

“So they asked me to do it and, of course, I said yes. I’d never seen a horror film in my life, never been involved in one. So I sat in Wardour Street Theatre and watched about six horror films in a row, staggered out and made Dracula has Risen from the Grave. Had a ball. I loved every minute of it. It was so funny, and it became a cult film.”

(L-R) Christopher Lee, Aida Young.

And so, Dracula has Risen from the Grave would join One Million Years B.C. and She as one of Hammer Films’ biggest moneymakers to date. The elder Carreras was so pleased he turned their Dracula franchise over to Young, who would produce Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Scars of Dracula (1970) with, admittedly, diminishing results in both quality and box office.

Said Young (ibid), “I hadn’t expected to make horror films, but I really enjoyed doing them. Maybe Dracula has Risen from the Grave was good because I was fresh to it?”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit. As I mentioned before, originally, Dracula has Risen from the Grave was supposed to play on a double-bill with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, but several production delays scotched this, starting with trying to find someone to do the special-effects.

It's kind of ironic it was Hammer Films that got master movie-animator Harryhausen back in the dinosaur business. For it was the same studio's Gothic horror-shows that sounded the death-knell on the resurgent sci-fi boom of the 1950s, which began with Harryhausen’s Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), and effectively brought an end to all those giant monster movies and irradiated creature features (-- with one notable exception over in Japan, ‘natch).

Ray Harryhausen.

But when they hired Harryhausen to provide the FX for One Million Years B.C., with the film's resulting box-office success, dinosaurs were suddenly back in vogue. Ergo, after a string of successful fantasy yarns based on the myths and legends of old -- The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Harryhausen's long time creative partner, producer Charles H. Schneer, decided their next collaborative project should be set in prehistoric times, too.

Here, Harryhausen dusted off an old unused script penned by his mentor, Willis O’Brien, and production began in earnest on The Valley of Gwangi (1969) -- also for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.

Carreras and Young, of course, had hoped Harryhausen would return and provide the dinosaurs for them again but now he was no longer available. And so, the production would have to look elsewhere for their prehistoric pandemonium this round; and initially, this search to fill some mighty big shoes began locally.

The British born Roger Dicken was another in a long line of film professionals that were lured into the business by the stop motion magics of O’Brien and Harryhausen. “As a young schoolboy I latched onto Mighty Joe Young (1949) and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein (1931), and these movies made a permanent impression upon me,” Dicken told Ken Miller (Monster Zone, January 30, 2022).

“I also saw King Kong (1933) and loved the old gorilla suits in the 1940s films,” said Dicken. “In the early ‘60s I rented the space over the top of an old garage and used to spend time there creating masks, unusual items, and experimenting with 8mm dinosaur animation.”

Then, when Harryhausen was in England, working on the animated set-pieces for Mysterious Island (1961), Dicken apparently knew somebody who knew somebody who managed to get him an invite to Shepperton Studios to see the master at work.

“He showed us the model air balloon and puppet squid from the Nemo sequences,” said Dicken (Miller, 2022), who also encountered several giant props for Gorgo (1961) during his visit, including a huge dinosaur foot made of fiberglass. “Ray’s friendliness and the trip to the studio in general so inspired me that I decided I would like to take a crack at working in the movies.”

Dicken’s first big break came when he got a job working on Gerry Anderson’s marionette-fueled Thunderbirds (1965-1966), building miniature landscapes and designing bizarre creatures for the Tracy family to do their daring-do in the TV-series and feature film, Thunderbirds Are GO (1966). He would do the same for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), pitching in on the moonscapes; and he would also provide the were-moth costume for The Blood Beast Terror (alias The Vampire Beast Craves Blood, 1968) and the grisly aftermath of the witch purges in The Conqueror Worm (alias The Witchfinder General, 1968).

Roger Dicken.

Now, at some point, Dicken had showed a demo reel of his homemade costumes and dinosaur footage to producer Anthony Hinds, who also played a key role in Hammer’s British invasion at the box-office with Horror of Dracula (1958) and Curse of the Werewolf (1961). But at the time, Hammer had no need for his talents.

Still, something must’ve stuck and left an impression because Hinds clued in Young, who would call Dicken and offered him the job of bringing When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth to life. "I got a call from [Young] at Hammer,” recalled Dicken in an interview with John Stoker (Little Shoppe of Horrors Magazine, November, 1996). But despite this incredible offer, Dicken balked, saying, “The problem was that I didn't feel experienced enough to tackle such a major project.”

Jim Danforth.

Thus, Carreras, Young and Hammer once more looked to America, hoping to snag another one of Harryhausen’s stop-motion disciples, Jim Danforth.

Like Dicken, Danforth started his career in TV, too, working for Art Clokey as a sculptor, animator and set designer for The Gumby Show (1953-1969) and Davey and Goliath (1960-1962). Danforth was only a teenager at the time, and he would then split-duties between Clokey Studios and Projects Unlimited, an independent special effects company formed by Wah Chang, Gene Warren and Tim Barr back in 1956.

Sadly, like a lot of technicians back in the day, working under the Projects Unlimited banner, Danforth would go uncredited on these early cinematic efforts. He worked as an assistant animator on George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960), which earned the company an Academy Award for its special-effects, and would pitch in on Pal’s subsequent efforts, providing animation for Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962).

He would do the same for American International’s Master of the World (1961) and Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), where he animated the alien cyclops that roars like Rodan (1956), who got his eye shot out rather messily.

And speaking of the cyclops, inspired by the success of Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and its many clones, producer Edward Small wanted something in the same, fanciful vein for United Artists. And to those ends he hired that film’s director, Nathan Juran, and two of its stars, Kerwin Mathews and Torin Thatcher, for Jack the Giant Killer (1962), hoping to capture the same magic. But he couldn’t get Harryhausen and settled on another special effects company, who in turn farmed out a lot of the stop-motion set-pieces to Projects Unlimited. 

And so, Danforth would join fellow animators Tom Holland and Dave Pal on Jack the Giant Killer, where he famously brought the witches to life in a truly outstanding sequence where the creatures lays siege on our hero’s ship and kidnap the princess.

Danforth (Left), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). 

After, Danforth was able to work with one of his heroes, Willis O’Brien, animating the climactic sequence in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), where the majority of the cast overloads a firetruck’s mounted rescue ladder, sending them flying off to meet their final destinations in miniature. He would then pitch in and help Project Unlimited earn another Academy Award nomination, working with Pal again on the 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), bringing the Loch Ness Monster to life, only to lose out to Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964).

Danforth would then spend the rest of the 1960s as a model maker, animator, or matte artist on things ranging from Father Goose (1964), The War Lord (1965), and Around the World Under the Sea (1966). He would also pitch in on David Allen and Dennis Muren’s The Equinox … A Journey into the Supernatural (1967), a glorified demo reel showing off Muren and Allen’s efforts in special-effects. (We covered this kit-bashed production rather extensively at the old bloggo and ported it over here for those who would like to know more.) Their efforts proved so successful the film was eventually picked up and released theatrically by Jack H. Harris as Equinox (1970).

But how did Danforth get on Hammer’s radar? Well, apparently, Carreras contacted Hyman to see if he could recommend a replacement for Harryhausen. Hyman in turn contacted Linwood Dunn, another revolutionary special-effects wizard, who helped develop the zoom lens and the optical printer, with films like King Kong, the original She (1935) and The Thing from Another World (1951) on his resume. And it was Dunn who recommended Danforth, then 28, to Hyman, who passed it along to Hammer.

“I received an early inquiry from Hammer saying that they would not commission the screenplay unless I was available,” said Danforth in Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio’s Hammer Films, An Exhaustive Filmography (1996). But, “After I gave the commitment, I was ‘out of the loop’ in that I was not asked to give any input.” A decision that would ultimately come back to haunt the production and bite Hammer on the ass, which we will unravel as to why and examine those bite marks in just a bit.

Young, Danforth.

With the FX set, Young then set about getting that screenplay sorted out and securing a director, hoping one man could fill both roles: Val Guest.

Guest had directed Hammer’s first color film, the swashbuckling adventure Men of Sherwood Forest (1954); but he really left his mark collaborating with author Nigel Kneale on their early B&W sci-fi output, including The Creeping Unknown, Enemy from Space (alias Quatermass 2, 1957), and The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957); though personally I contend his best film was The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), an eco-disaster movie wrapped up in a newspaper drama, which he wrote and directed for British Lion Films.

And so, armed with a script treatment penned by noted sci-fi novelist, J.G. Ballard (The Drowned World, Crash), Young headed to the isle of Malta, where Guest was currently vacationing, to make her pitch.

“[She] flew over to see me with a bare bones sort of story and said would I like to do it,” said Guest (Kinsey, 2007). He soon signed on. “I thought what a wonderful idea if we could shoot it in Malta, then I could have my holiday pad and get paid.”

Val Guest.

Here, it should be noted that Ballard’s treatment was barely twenty pages long and Guest didn’t really think much of it, cherry-picking a few ideas, shit-canned the rest, and then sort of just free-wheeled his way through a rehash of the same plot-points from One Million Years B.C.

“The treatment was done as a story, actually, it wasn’t in script form at all,” said Guest in an interview with Sue and Colin Cowie (Little Shoppe of Horrors Magazine, 1978). “I took the basic line and one or two good ideas in it but then had to build from there. It was a very sketchy script."

One of Guest’s biggest contributions in fleshing out these bare-bones was his creation of a primitive language for his cave-people to speak. “I invented and wrote a whole new language for them,” said Guest (Kinsey, 2007). “I actually thought if we could do this really believing in what you’re doing, we may get away with it.”

To help with the translation, Hammer would provide a lobby poster promoting the language so audiences could get up to speed and follow along. This language consisted of about 27 words based on a mash-up of Phoenician, Latin, and Sanskrit. Some of the keywords were fairly easy to pick up: "neecha" means "stop" or "come back"; "akita" means "look"; "neekro" means "bad" or "evil"; "mata" is "dead"; and "yo kita" translates as "go.” The rest really didn’t matter because it was easy enough to just follow the pantomime of the primitive gesticulating.

Racquel Welch.

Thus, with Danforth and Guest onboard, Young now had suitable replacements for Harryhausen and director Don Chaffey. Now all she needed was a replacement for Welch to fill out that leather bikini. Enter Victoria Vetri.

Now, believe it or not, one of Young’s main tasks as an associate producer on One Million Years B.C. was to make sure the press never discovered their glamorous leading lady was actually a married mother of two from a previous marriage.

“I had a hard time because, in those days, attractive women like that were not meant to be married, so that everybody would lust after her,” explained Young (TBEHP, 1995). “She had a little boy and a little girl, and so the husband and the two kids were in one hotel and Raquel was in another, and I had to be sure that nobody knew that they were related. It was, you know, that was another nerve racking situation.”

Despite Welch’s reputation for being difficult, Young had nothing but praise for the burgeoning starlet. Said Young (ibid), “She was very, very good. She was very professional, she acted well, and she did as she was told. She was very, very co-operative. She was a very nice girl actually. She was very nice. I know that people like to talk about those people being difficult the more attractive they are.”

Victoria Vetri (alias Angela Dorian). 

Vetri, meanwhile, was born in San Francisco, California, to Italian immigrants. The family moved to Hollywood in the 1950s, where she attended Hollywood High and began acting and modeling in her teens. Under her stage name Angela Dorian, Vetri was offered the chance to dub Natalie Wood’s songs in West Side Story (1961) but turned it down. (Other sources say she auditioned for the role that eventually went to Wood.) She also auditioned for the lead in Kubrick’s Lolita but lost out to Sue Lyon.

But Vetri did find a modicum of success playing supporting characters on several TV series, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968), where she played a go-go dancer who gets kidnapped in “The Indian Affairs Affair” (S2.E30), and in Batman (1966-1968) she played King Tut’s femme fatale Florence of Arabia in “I’ll Be a Mummy’s Uncle” (S3.E23).

This led to some minor roles on the big screen; most notably in the western Chuka (1967), where she and Rod Taylor manage to survive a brutal massacre, and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where she played Mia Farrow’s neighbor at the Bramford, who died under somewhat dubious circumstances -- a fall from an 11th floor window. (Was she pushed? Was it a suicide?  Who can say. However, according to the lore, it was director Roman Polanski who convinced Vetri to eventually dump her alias of Angela Dorian.)

Meanwhile, in 1967, Vetri, still as Dorian, posed for Playboy Magazine and was selected as Playmate of the Month for September, 1967. She would later garner Playmate of the Year honors in 1968, which not only earned her an all pink 1968 AMC AMX but a trip to the moon. Well, sort of. 

See, as a prank, Vetri’s centerfold pic was inserted into a checklist on the Apollo 12 mission, which wasn't discovered until they had landed near the Oceanus Procellarum, where it was safely tucked inside astronaut Pete Conrad’s pocket.

"I had no idea they were with us,” Conrad revealed in a later interview (sourced from Boing Boing, January 13, 2007); ‘they’ referring to pics of fellow Playmates Reagan Wilson (October, 1967) and Cynthia Myers (December, 1969). “It wasn't until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them." Fellow astronaut Al Bean recalled, "It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was (Myers). I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his (Vetri, Wilson)."

Now, Vetri has hoped her *ahem* ‘exposure’ in Playboy would help her acting career. Not so much the baring of skin but being invited to the mansion parties, where many a producer, director and casting agent lurked. (Odds are good this was how she landed the role in Rosemary’s Baby.) And it worked, as it helped her land a multi-picture contract with Warner Bros.-Seven Arts and landed the actress her first lead role as Sanna in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

According to the IMDB, Vetri said she had her first audition for the role in Hollywood, where she met Francis Ford Coppola, who was “not connected to the film in any way, shape, or form; just helping to coordinate the auditions.” Vetri claimed that Coppola had her “run back and forth through the backlot, wearing a bikini, panting and flaring her nostrils, while a cameraman filmed her.” He then sent the test footage to producer Aida Young in London. Young was impressed and had Vetri fly to England for more auditions.

And while the Hammer publicity department worked overtime to hide Welch’s past, they had to do the same for Vetri, too, who was a twice-divorced mother of one. However, they had no such qualms about playing up and ballyhooing Vetri’s history as a Playboy Playmate during the film’s pre-production and promotional phase.

In his Q&A column for The Tampa Tribune (April 25, 1971), Hy Gardner ballyhooed Vetri as Hollywood’s newest sex symbol, saying “Victoria Vetri, Miss Playmate of 1968, five-foot-five, measurements 37-21-35, topped by a breathtakingly beautiful face, like Miss Welch, plays a cave girl in Warner’s science-fiction flick, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Clad in a costume so scanty it barely covers her insurance.”

Even noted critic Roger Ebert waxed poetically about getting a look at the newest cavegirl. “A couple of years have passed since the last bosomy starlet fought for her life with a scaly prehistoric lizard while trying to keep her neckline high enough for the GP rating,” said Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times, February 14, 1971), who felt there was an unwritten cinematic law that said “people don’t come to these movies to watch the lizards.”

“The old reliables of prehistoric sex melodramas have all gone on to loftier things. Raquel Welch hasn’t appeared in a loincloth for so many years that her fans now have to take her loins largely on trust, and after Ursula Andress did She, she started appearing in public with intellectuals like Marcello Mastroianni.” But! “Sometime this winter or spring, depending on how well our luck holds out, a movie titled When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is going to open. I’m rather looking forward to it.”

For the wagging tongues in the audience, Vetri would be aided and abetted by Imogene Hassall (Ayak) and Magda Konopka (Ulido) on the cheesecake front; but there was plenty of bare-chested beefcake and buttsteak for the ladies in the audience, too, provided by Robin Hawdon (Tara), Drewe Henley (Khaku) and Sean Caffrey (Kane).

“It wasn’t too difficult playing a caveman,” said Patrick Allen (Kinsey, 2007), who played the zealot Kingsor, leader of the Rock Tribe. “It’s like acting in any role. One didn’t think about it being a problem -- wear as few clothes as possible, wear a beard, and learn a language of forty words without verbs. You’d use your hands to express.”

And so, with the cast and crew finally set, and with a staggering budget (by Hammer’s standards) of $752,000, the production of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth began on October 12, 1968, with five weeks of location work in the Canary Islands, where they would shoot mostly on Fuerteventura, along with the Valley of the Toledos and the Caves of the Vestal Virgins near Moya on Gran Canaria. (Alas, Guest’s plans to finance his vacation fell through when they found no suitable cliffs or mountains in Malta.)

Things got off to a bit of a rocky start when Vetri refused to dye her auburn hair blonde for the production, demanding a wig instead.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (February 2, 1971). 

“I told the producer I wouldn’t dye my hair,” said Vetri (The Richmond Independent, December 12, 1970), while 'marveling at her own audacity.' “I knew this film could make me an instant star, the same as happened to Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress when they appeared in similar types of films produced by Mrs. Young, yet I just wouldn’t dye it. So we compromised and I wore a blonde wig, which created some problems when I had to dive into the water. It kept floating to the surface, but eventually we learned how to secure it.”

As for the rest of her wardrobe, “Just scanty furs and skins,” she said. “I doubt that women at the time covered their bosoms -- but in this film, I do.” Well, mostly.

 The Daily Press (May 7, 1971).

Said costume designer Carl Toms (Today’s Cinema, October 1, 1971), “Berman’s invented a very clever recipe for fish scales. They molded costumes out of latex rubber and painted them with color pigment mixed with varnish. By the time we had been on several days of location, the costumes became so weather-beaten that they looked rather than smelt authentic.”

And while Guest wasn’t thrilled with being saddled with another studio-mandated American actor, and wasn’t a huge fan of his leading actress, finding her to be nothing more than “a nitwit,” Vetri proved fine enough onscreen as our feisty and intrepid Sanna, who, you will remember, was currently fleeing from the pursuing Khaku, is almost crushed by a python, and then gets nearly consumed by a carnivorous plant! How did she escape?

Well, for that answer plus a whole lot more, you’ll have to tune into Part Two of our Two Part look at When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, where things get a little testy behind the scenes. Stay tuned! I mean, Udala kayera krasta t'ammo akita m'dana, preto!

Originally posted on June 3, 2018, at Micro-Brewed Reviews. 

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) Hammer Films :: Warner Bros / P: Aida Young / D: Val Guest / W: Val Guest, J.G. Ballard / C: Dick Bush / E: Peter Curran / M: Mario Nascimbene/ S: Victoria Vetri, Robin Hawdon, Drewe Henley, Imogen Hassall, Patrick Allen