FANTASIA OBSCURA: That Other Sci-Fi Movie With a Bun-Haired Female Lead
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, even with the fossil evidence before you, you can’t be sure that what you’re looking at is a missing link.
The People That Time Forgot (1977)
(Dist.: American International; Dir.: Kevin Connor)
Doug McClure and Edgar Rice Burroughs were almost inseparable in the mid-1970s. After the success of The Land That Time Forgot, A-I asked McClure to do not one, but two more pics sourced from Burroughs’ writings.
The first, At the Earth’s Core, was also directed by Kevin Connor and was based on a serialized story of the same name first published in 1914.
Unlike the first film with a screenplay that grounded the characters in a well-considered story, McClure and the rest of the cast (including Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro) appear confused in a script that seemed random, amidst sets better suited to represent the Living Island than any serious effort to give us Pellucidar.
McClure especially looks like he was tired and worn down as he trudges through the film; by this time, Hollywood was not returning his calls that quickly, and this being the second of two “lost world” films in a row after his last television series Search got cancelled by NBC, he probably felt as buried underground as the second set of dinosaur puppets he had to share the screen with.
Which explains why McClure gets a “special guest star” credit when Connor finally returns to Caprona:
The film opens a few years after we watched Bowen Tyler throw his memoir into the sea; the account is there on the ward-room table of the vessel used by Tyler’s friend, Major Ben McBride (Patrick Wayne, John Wayne’s son), to mount an expedition to find and retrieve Tyler.
On the trip are Hogan (Shane Rimmer), Tyler’s buddy from the war and mechanic who fixes the plane to get over the high cliffs of Caprona; Norfolk (Thorley Walters), the paleontologist retained to study the creatures Tyler described; and Lady Charlotte “Charly” Cunningham (Sarah Douglas), reporter and daughter of McBride’s sponsor.
Their plan, similar to the original book from 1918, involves flying inland over the cliffs and tracking down Tyler. It goes awry when the plane is attacked by pterodactyls.
Going on by foot, they encounter a primitive woman, Ajor (Dana Gilespie, taking one of her acting breaks from her long musical career), who helps lead the party to the lands of the Nargas, a faction wielding Iron Age technology while ensconced in ruins in the midst of a wasteland. These fearsome, armored, mounted warriors have the man they’re looking for, whom they find in a cell just in time before doom and destruction threatens everyone.
Where its predecessor was nicely paced for the most part and gave every character a chance to pop open a few dimensions, this time around the cast just takes their marks, delivers their lines, and moves on to the next set piece.
Screenwriter Patrick Tilley didn’t provide the same kind of craft Michael Moorcock did with the first one; the fact that Tilley’s script shows signs of pressure to wrap the series of films without leaving room for an adaptation of the follow-up book by Burroughs, Out of Time’s Abyss, suggests that there may have been a business decision to close up shop on the whole effort, hence the hackneyed story that can’t gloss over the distraction of the puppet dinos.
In any event, if the plot sounds a little familiar, it didn’t help that there was another sequel years before in another film franchise that followed the same formula:
What does strike a current viewer, however, isn’t so much People’s similarities to a film that came before it, but with one of its contemporaries. Principal shooting on People took place at Pinewood Studios, a mere 13 and a half miles away from Elstree Studios, where at the same time, George Lucas was shooting his 1977 release. It’s hard not to notice a few things that they shared:
For one, both films share strong female leads in Douglas’ Charly and Carrie Fisher’s Leia, two women who both have long dark hair styled in two side buns over their ears, sharing an unmistakable coiffure.
The helmets of the Nargas were unmistakably influenced by kabuto, Japanese helmets from the samurai era that also influenced the helmets worn by the Stormtroopers and Darth Vader.
There’s also the fact that David Prowse has roles in both films as the right hand of a despotic overlord. He’s also the executioner for the leader of the Nargas in People and the body of Darth Vader. (Although, in all fairness, this may be most easily explained, considering the way English actors could easily get attached to projects like this, as detailed in the 2015 documentary Elstree 1976.)
Was it all coincidence? A shared zeitgeist? A few words overheard at a pub by one side over from the other somewhere in Stanmore, between the two lots? Something else, maybe?
While one of the two to films with bun-haired, strong women went on to become a cultural touchstone, the other petered out in the quick-to-forget shadows.
The production company responsible for the Burrows adaptations, Amicus Pictures, dissolved after People’s release, but McClure would have one more encounter with lost cultures under Connor’s direction, the original (their words, not mine) story Warlords of Atlantis, before finding his way back to the States and a series of guest roles on television before getting steady work on the syndicated sitcom Out of This World.
Once back on television, away from any of Burrough’s works, he never had to face off against another dinosaur puppet ever again.
NEXT TIME: We will survive this black magic, thanks to a brave sailor and the mercy of Allah…
