Forgotten Films: The Lost World (1925)
This is the 42nd in my series of Forgotten Obscure or Neglected Films
As an ape movie fan, I can say there is no better ape film than the original King Kong. And what made that film great was the work of Willis O’Brien, a stop motion animator extraordinaire. So this week we look at one of O’Brien’s early works.
THE LOST WORLD was the first film adaptation of the Professor Challenger story. And it is a dandy. This version starts with Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) stating that he has proof that dinosaurs still live. He is basically a laughing stock when presenting his views to the scientific community. When they reject him, he says that he will bring back proof if anyone is brave enough to go with him. Professor Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt) says he does not believe him but will go along. Adventurer Sir John Roxton (Lewis Stone) is a friend of Challenger’s and agrees to go as does Edward Malone (Lloyd Hughes) a newspaperman who gets his paper to finance he trip with the idea of rescuing Challenger’s friend Maple White. White’s daughter Paula (Bessie Love) was with him in the Amazon when they got separated. She has his diary with pictures of the dinosaurs they encountered on a lat plateau. Malone’s paper does not believe the dinosaur story but they like the idea of the human interest story in rescuing the lost explorer.
With good backing and Paula as a guide, they find the plateau and the dinosaurs as well as the lost explorer. There is a love triangle between Paula, Sir John and Malone. Malone wins! The story is familiar. What makes this film memorable is the dinosaurs. Willis O’Brien and Marcel Delgado, stop motion animation gods, are working on their first full length film. Prior to this O’Brien had done some shorts but nothing with this ambitious depth. THE LOST WORLD was Delgado’s first film work.
There are lots of dinosaurs – a pterodactyl, allosaurus, triceratops, stegosaurus and others all grace the screen. The stop motion is crude by modern standards but well past state of the art for 1925. It’s a short film (my copy was 52 minutes. IMDB lists the running time as 64 minutes). My copy was a cheap public domain copy I got for $1 at a store a few years back. It came with THE GIANT GILA MONSTER and a Superman cartoon (The Arctic Beast with a T Rex) on it. The print was a little dark and the score was hokey, even for a silent film. But still, it was a dollar well spent.
If you are a fan of O’Brien or Harryhausen, this is a film for you. Now I just need to see CREATION, his other early masterpiece that led to KING KONG.
Series organizer Todd Mason hosts more Tuesday Forgotten Film reviews at his own blog and posts a complete list of participating blogs.
