The Lost World (1925)

Director: Harry O. Hoyt
Writer: Marion Fairfax, based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle
Stars: Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Wallace Beery and Lloyd Hughes

Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this one! I have seen it before, probably more than once, but not for a couple of decades and I’m unsure as to the completeness of those versions. Now, I’m watching as complete a version as exists, a 92 minute composite of eight prints.

It’s the Arthur Conan Doyle story, of course, a pivotal 1912 novel that didn’t invent a genre but did give it a name. It stands up very well as a smooth read free of the excesses of Victorian literature and as an archetypal adventure.

Of course, Hollywood ached to adapt it but a crucial detail needed to be squared away. How were they going to depict the dinosaurs? Well, enter Willis O’Brien, who had been animating them in stop motion since The Dinosaur and the Missing Link in 1915 and the far more advanced The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in 1918. He’s best known today as the animator of King Kong but his work here was just as pioneering.

For a while, this is right up there with King Kong as an adventure story. The casting is spot on and the pace strong as the scene is set. And the glorious reason for Edward Malone to get involved in shenanigans remains in place: he’s in love with Gladys who doesn’t want him to propose. “Things are much nicer as they are,” she tells him, adding that “I will only marry a man of great deeds and strange experiences—a man who can look death in the face without flinching.” So, with that in mind, let’s adjourn to the Zoological Hall to hear Prof. Challenger.

It seems that an explorer, Maple White, had journeyed to South America and documented his discoveries in a diary, including drawings of live dinosaurs. His daughter had brought it to Challenger in London and he believes it to be true, so plans to mount an expedition of his own to witness these creatures himself and, if possible, rescue Maple White.

Now, Challenger is a wild and woolly violent man, so Wallace Beery is a pristine choice for the role. As the newspapers mocked his “yarn about dinosaurs”, he attacked three reporters sent to interview him. Malone, seeking much danger, is more successful, partly because he’s honest and partly because they have a mutual friend in Lord John Roxton, big game hunter, played by a serious looking Lewis Stone.

And so Malone and Roxton volunteer to go on Challenger’s expedition, as does a doubting rival, the 67 year old Prof. Summerlee, and, of course, Maple White’s daughter Paula, played by the doe faced Bessie Love, seen in close up far too often to showcase her distressed look. And, zap, one hilariously primitive animation later, they’re in South America.

I know Beery, Stone and Love from a slew of films. They were powerful actors and they’re well cast here, as was Lloyd Hughes as Malone, an actor I don’t know, even though I have seen him before in Tess of the Storm Country opposite Mary Pickford. Malone is thus handsome and willing but nervous and inexperienced.

After such a stellar opening, the film keeps its standards high as our party work through the jungle to reach Maple White’s mysterious plateau in between Peru, Brazil and Colombia. Shots here are beautifully framed, though the camera hardly moves. This is Russ Meyer-style action, created through in frame motion and clever editing. And, soon enough, we’re there and O’Brien can start working his magic.

Oddly, the first prehistoric creature we see is professional wrestler Bull Montana wearing a missing link style ape man suit, which is fair but not a patch on O’Brien’s pterodactyl. The stop motion there is a little jerky to our eyes, but amazing for 1925. His brontosaurus is even smoother, picking up a tree with its trunk and cutting off the expedition’s escape.

This is magic cinema! If you remember that moment when Laura Dern and Sam O’Neill see living dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, then you need to know that this is where Steven Spielberg got it from, sixty-eight years earlier and just as powerful. No, we don’t have a T. Rex, but we do have multiple allosauruses who are hungry and vicious and start a whole lot of fights. A triceratops kills one to protect its cub but is promptly killed by another. The circle of life wasn’t just in The Lion King.

Thus far, The Lost World is a bona fide classic but the seams start to show on the plateau. It isn’t the actors who let the side down and it’s certainly not O’Brien’s dinosaurs. The script is a little unsure of how to maintain a good flow, given how much is going on.

There are the dinosaurs, of course, and we’d happily watch them fight each other until the cows come home. There’s Malone’s tale, facing danger to become the man Gladys wants him to be. Except he’s also falling for Paula, which makes things a little awkward, not just for her and him but for Roxton, who loves her too and wants to marry her and is man enough to not stand in her way. Of course, there’s the search for her father, Maple White, presumably still on the plateau somewhere, dead or alive.

And, of course, there’s Prof. Challenger, the architect of the expedition. He isn’t the lead character, as that role falls to Malone, but he’s the dominant force in every situation, except when his wife is present, and his is the role we would usually focus on, especially in the hands of such a strong character actor as Beery.

Unfortunately the script doesn’t know what to do with him, given all the other things, and so relegates him to battles of one-upmanship with Prof. Summerlee, which isn’t the best use of either of them. We weren’t expecting to see Arthur Hoyt do much, except be proved wrong plenty of times as Summerlee, but we want a lot more from Beery and Challenger.

Most of the problem there is with the script by Marion Fairfax losing focus, but some of it is due to Doyle, because the erupting volcano is a little too much and a little too quick. In a four or eight hour version, it would be fine, but this suffers for having so much crammed into the scenes up on the plateau.

After all, we have to get back to London yet with Challenger’s proof: a living brontosaurus, which promptly escapes to rampage through the streets and fall off Tower Bridge and we’re back in movie magic again.

At the end of the day, this isn’t the film that it could have been, but it’s ninety per cent of it and it’s glorious. It stands on its own merits as a thoroughly enjoyable adventure feature. It’s also the bedrock on which King Kong and the Jurassic Park franchise were built, and arguably the entire modern era of effects movies.

In short, it’s one of the essentials.