Near to where they lived was a small Cro-Magnon community that was decimated in an earthquake, leaving only a small girl named Ayla, who was adopted into the Clan of the Cave Bear because of the kindly medicine woman of that tribe, Iza (Pamela Reed). Now then, somewhere around the end of the last ice age, there was a tribe of Neandertal people who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear. Lucky for the novel, because the sins of the movie start early and they never really do stop. No, the cinematic Clan of the Cave Bear is even something of a disaster, losing an immense sum of money, and the author took the extreme and unusual step of suing the filmmakers for spoiling her property so badly meaning that if nothing else, we cannot use the sins of the movie to judge the novel. However, the 1986 movie based on it? Not ingenious in any way (it is a blight on the career of screenwriter John Sayles, responsible for many fine genre flicks and observational indie movies about small communities). I'll admit to never having taken the plunge into Auel's Earth's Children series, of which TCotCB is the first volume and thus I will take her fans at their word. Auel's 1980 novel The Clan of the Cave Bear will have you believe that it is an ingenious mixture of romantic fiction with impressively-researched historical fact (allowing that we know things now that we did not at the time of the book's publication, and by the cold light of 21st Century anthropology, its depiction of Neandertals is pretty far off course), and that the whole thing is as enlightening a fantasy hybridised with then-current archeological thought could ever manage to be. Let us thus pay attention to a movie that teach ADULTS a fantastically inaccurate version of what life was like 25,000 years ago.įans of Jean M. This week: Ice Age: Continental Drift is the fourth entry in the inexplicably durable franchise that teaches our children a fantastically inaccurate version of what happened in the last glacial period.

Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.

The clan of the cave bear author