Great-ish Performances - John Lone in Iceman

Giving credit where it's long overdue.

He was quite the thing in the mid-1980s, John Lone. Squaring off against Mickey Rourke in Michael Cimino’s The Year Of The Dragon, playing the adult Pu Yi in Bertolcucci’s The Last Emperor; the Chinese-American actor looked set for big things. As it stands, Lone hasn’t worked since the mid-2000s. One can only hope this is out of choice.

As for his best work, I’d point to his idiosyncratic turn as ‘Charlie’ in Fred Schepisi’s Iceman (1984). ‘Charlie’ is a Neanderthal man retrieved from the Arctic ice by American researchers. So far, so Scooby-Doo/Horror Express. Revived and rehabilitated in large part by Timothy Hutton’s bizarrely coiffured Dr Stanley Sheppard, ‘Charlie’ is confined to a habitat in much the same way as a gorilla, chimp or orangutang might be. ‘Charlie’, however, is an especially great ape, one with a gift for using tools and creating fire and an understanding of spirituality not dissimilar to that of the region’s Aleutian peoples.

Cavemen films were all the rage in the 1970s and ‘80s. Besides the last grunts of Hammer’s furry shorts-and-stop-animation saga, you have none other than Anthony Burgess conjuring up primitive languages for Everert McGill, Ron Perlman and their fellow tribesmen in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest For Fire (1981). You also had Darryl Hannah playing a Cro-Magnon girl raised by Neanderthals in Michael Chapman’s The Clan Of The Cave Bear (1985).

That Iceman stands apart from these other pictures is almost entirely due to Lone’s impressive physical performance as a man out of time. Through sheer good fortune, Lone also bares a far closer resemblance to what we now believe Neanderthals looked like. Shorter than Homo Sapiens but considerably more muscular, Neanderthals were also far less hairy than the books and films have led us to assume. Their vocalisations might also have been more sophisticated than pop culture has presented, a fact that makes ‘Charlie’s’ attempts to communicate with Hutton’s scientist more compelling and Lone’s performance considerably more layered.

It’s now recognised that, far from being a step on the path of modern human evolution, Neanderthals were our contemporaries. DNA studies even point to the species having inter-bred. Which might seem a bit fair fetched to those who’ve seen Everett McGill going toe-to-toe with Martin Ruane (aka World Of Sport favourite Giant Haystacks) in Quest For Fire. However, after 140 minutes in ‘Charlie’s’ company, it’s easy to understand how man and Neanderthal could have seen one another as equals.