Product: La Guerre du feu (1982)
Rating: 4.0
Cro Magnon, Neanderthal, H. erectus
An entertaining effort to depict the interaction of different human types and the quest for fire almost 100,000 years ago. Our protagonists seem to be pre-H.sapiens types, possibly Neanderthal or H. heidelburgensis. They possess fire probably obtained from a natural event [forest fire?] but don't know how to produce fire from scratch. Therefore fire is carefully tended to because its loss would be catastrophic to the entire tribe.Attacked by even more primitive 'people' the fire is lost and our heroes sally out in an effort to find more fire. In so doing they are again attacked by more culturally/physically primitive people [H. erectus/H. heidelburgensis?] and are ultimately taken captive by a more advanced people, presumably H. sapiens [Cro-Magnons] who do, in fact, know the secrets of creating fire. If there is any doubt that these folks are Cro-Magnons, they order one of our heroes to service multiple fat women who look much like the Cro-Magnon 'Venus of Willendorf'.Anyway, it is all great fun and highly imaginative. I didn't like the scene, however, in which our heroes gain the grateful trust of mammoths by hand feeding them grass. Too Hollywood. Yes, I know this is a French production but the scene was still far too Hollywood for my liking.