The Clan of the Cave Bear

Director Michael Chapman, an experienced cinematographer, is skilled in conveying ideas through pictures -- quite an advantage in a movie about people who aren't especially verbal. And Chapman's cinematographer, Jan De Bont, has a varied palette that responds to the visual demands of a world in transition.

Devotees of John Sayles' witty, literate screenplays will be disappointed by the repartee of subtitled grunts, while beneath the film's apparent plea for tolerance lies the offensive (if quite possibly true) assumption that tall, tanned Californian blondes represent the highest form of human life.

The Clan of the Cave Bear is a dull, overly genteel rendition of Jean M. Auel's novel. Handsomely produced on rugged Canadian exteriors, this is the story of pre-history's first feminist.

After much time with this soggy, quarrelsome clan, your sympathies may lie entirely with the bear.

The filmmakers made no effort to empathize with their prehistoric characters, to imagine what it might have really been like back then.

The Clan of the Cave Bear is dog. [27 Jan 1986, p.69]

The cinematic adaptation of the novel, however, is so laughably awful that Auel later sued the producers for creating such an inaccurate work.