Only the bare bones of Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal 1912 text are contained in this, the grandaddy of monster mash cinema. INGAGI, KING KONG, GODZILLA, JURASSIC PARK and its sequel (which took its title and quite a few plot points from the present film) were all directly anticipated by the stop motion dinosaurs of THE LOST WORLD, released in the seminal year 1925 (which gave us the quasi-documentary FIFTY MILLION YEARS AGO, also containing stop motion dinos).
THE LOST WORLD (1925) Full Movie
The film had an initial 104 minute runtime, but that version was lost for nearly a century. An hour-long abbreviation was for decades the only available version, followed by a pieced-together 93-minute cut released in the aughts. It took until 2017 for the initial version to be restored.
The film begins with footage of Arthur Conan Doyle himself (to bolster the literary pedigree), followed by the “human interest” portion: the glamorous Londoner Gladys Hungerford (Alma Bennett) gets engaged to newspaper reporter Ed Malone (Lloyd Hughes), but informs him she wants a “man who can look death in the face without flinching.” Eager to prove himself, Ed latches onto Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery), a famous zoologist who’s returned to London from a remote region of the Amazon, where he claims to have interacted with dinosaurs. He’s decided to mount a second expedition, upon which Ed eagerly volunteers his services, as does Paula White (Bessie Love), the daughter of an explorer who vanished during the previous expedition.
They and several other intrepid folk set sail for the “half-defined frontiers between Peru, Brazil, and Columbia.” Lots of exotic critters are encountered, including a leopard, a sloth, a bear cub and an ape-man (part of a lost race that attacks the protagonists in the novel, but were largely jettisoned by the filmmakers).
They reach the “great plateau” in which Paula’s father disappeared, where they see a pterodactyl and a Brontosaurus. This is followed by a great deal of dinosaur action, as a four-legged stegosaurus and a deadly allosaurus join the fun, fighting each other. The humans build weapons to fight off the dinos and ready a cave for habitation, where Ed declares his love for Paula (ho, hum).
Eventually a volcano erupts, causing a mass dinosaur migration, and the expedition heads back to London with a brontosaurus (in place of the pterodactyl that was brought back in the novel) in tow. The critter is set to be exhibited in a vast lecture hall, but it breaks loose and runs wild in the streets of London. There it topples statues, destroys an apartment building, breaks London Bridge in two and swims away as Ed learns that Gladys has cozied up to another man, and so freed him to marry Paula.
The stop motion effects were accomplished by the film’s “technical director” Willis O’Brien. It’s not at all difficult to detect the through line from this film to Willis’ work on KING KONG (1933), and one can see the origins of the modern-day monster movie in the structure, which focuses on commonplace melodrama in the early scenes and saves the good stuff for around the halfway point. There’s plenty of action once things get going, with dinosaur fights galore (one has to be forgiving of the sappy romantic elements, and also the poorly integrated paintings that serve as establishing shots).
The special effects are quite primitive by modern standards, but impressive in their frequency and eye for detail (stop motion was neither easy nor cheap in 1925). The choppiness of the narrative was apparently decreed by the editors, who wisely chose to emphasize the dinosaurs (with, according to one estimate, about half the original footage left on the cutting room floor); as a LIFE magazine reviewer wrote of the film around the time of its initial release, “Mechanically THE LOST WORLD is marvelous, dramatically not so hot.” Aside from Arthur Conan Doyle, Willis O’Brien was the only real name to emerge from THE LOST WORLD, and that’s as it should be.
Vital Statistics
THE LOST WORLD
First National Pictures, Inc.
Director: Harry O. Hoyt
Producer: Earl Hudson
Screenplay: Marion Fairfax
(Based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle)
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Editing: George McGuire
Cast: Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Wallace Beery, Lloyd Hughes, Alama Bennett, Arthur Hoyt, Margaret McWade, Bull Montana, Finch Smiles, Jules Cowles, George Bunny, Charles Wellsley