The Lost World (1925)
Directed by Harry O. Hoyt

Film Review

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular 1912 novel The Lost World presented formidable challenges for the production team of this silent fantasy adventure movie but the end results are spectacular.  Cinema's first convincing attempt at a dinosaur movie has become a classic of its genre, and the method use to animate the dinosaurs - stop motion photography - was so successful that Conan Doyle almost managed to convince the world that dinosaurs had been discovered for real when he exhibited a test reel at a meeting of the Society of American Magicians.  Willis O'Brien was the effects master who oversaw the animation and would later apply the same technique, to stunning effect, on Merian C. Cooper's classic original production of King Kong (1933).  The dinosaurs O'Brien created for The Lost World don't just move - they breathe, flex their muscles and have a personality all of their own.  You'd almost swear they were alive! 

Although enormously popular in its day, the film came perilously close to going the same way as its dinosaur stars. The original ten-reel version of the film, which ran to about 108 minutes, no longer exists.  In 1929, all known prints of the film were destroyed by the distributor at the request of the widow of the film's producer.  An abridged five-reel version somehow survived this purge and continued to be distributed, mainly for educational purposes; this was later used to create the 16mm Kodascope print which became more widely circulated in later years.  In 1992, an almost complete 35mm print from the foreign negative of the film was discovered in Prague, allowing a reconstructed version of the film to become available in 1997. 

Watching The Lost World today, it is always a surprise to see how astonishingly good the special effects are.  Some of the shots of the marauding dinosaurs are on a par with, or better than, what can be realised with today's computer generated wizardry and set an incredibly high standard for subsequent films featuring prehistoric or fantastic creatures.  Some of the most daring sequences employ composite shots, with animated dinosaurs in the background and live action humans in the foreground (or vice versa).  When the effects occasionally fail to convince the oversized reptiles still have an endearing quality and find it remarkably easy to outstage the human members of the cast (a feat that owes something to the fact that the protagonists are, without exception, tediously bland and archetypal).   The sequence involving a brontosaurus (sorry, apatosaurus) running amok in London is more laugh-out-loud funny than thrilling, although it does prefigure similar monstrous invasions of familiar urban landscapes, most famously in the King King and Godzilla movies.  The Lost World was a triumph of the silent era and still looks pretty respectable compared with more recent dino flicks, including Jurassic Park (which is essentially just a rip-off of Conan Doyle's novel).

Film Synopsis

No one believes Professor Challenger's claims that living dinosaurs have been discovered in South America.  Eager to make a name for himself, a young journalist named Edward Malone persuades his newspaper to back a mission to the Amazon to rescue Maple White, the leader of a previous expedition, whose journal contains sketches of the dinosaurs he has apparently encountered.  Accompanied by Malone, White's daughter Paula and big game hunter Sir John Roxton, Challenger leads the second expedition to South America.  Here, the party discovers a remote plateau on which they encounter a bewildering assortment of prehistoric animals.  Challenger's attempt to capture one of the dinosaurs and bring it back to London will have disastrous consequences...